Commentaryhttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary
Sun, 02 Aug 2015 22:20:07 +0000CFIF CMSen-gbWhat's More Offensive Than Huckabee's Holocaust Remark? Obama's Iran Dealhttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/59-media-issues/2701-whats-more-offensive-than-huckabees-holocaust-remark-obamas-iran-deal
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/59-media-issues/2701-whats-more-offensive-than-huckabees-holocaust-remark-obamas-iran-dealIn an interview with Breitbart News, Mike Huckabee accused President Barack Obama of being "naïve" for trusting Iran to uphold its part of the recent agreement struck by the nations.

By doing so, Huckabee said, Obama is marching Israelis "to the door of the oven."

The Anti-Defamation League, self-proclaimed guardians of (imaginary) Jewish values, swiftly denounced Huckabee's language. Political reporters sprinted to the nearest Democrat to gauge exactly how offended Americans should all be. Huckabee was invited to appear on a bunch of TV and radio shows so that hosts could nudge him into expressing something even more disagreeable (as if such a thing were possible).

CNN says Huckabee "out-Trumps GOP field ahead of debate." CNBC says that "Huckabee Trounces Trump in the Shameless Shock Game." Time magazine points out that "Obama, whose great uncle helped to liberate part of the Buchenwald camp in Germany, took offense to Huckabee's rhetoric."

MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski teed up a little emotional sermon of her own:

"If you've been to Auschwitz, if you've been to Birkenau, if you've been to any of these places where people were killed and you see the piles of glasses, the piles of hair, the piles of shoes and the piles of clothes and every bit of their humanity that had to be stripped away, handed over, as they went and then burned to their deaths, among other things, it's really not a good comment to say. It's a deal breaker! It should be over for him. You don't say that. And by the way, if you said it by mistake, that's a sign of who you really are."

You know what else people don't do by mistake? Work on a deal for years that enriches and emboldens Iranian ambitions -- and puts Jewish lives in danger. That, too, no doubt, tells us something about who people really are. Yes, Birkenau is a reminder of a depraved regime. But there are contemporary regimes that are similarly depraved -- even if they lack comparable technical and industrial skills. For now.

So for some of us who grew up with survivors, it is a bit disconcerting that folks such as Brzezinski are more outraged by the offhand remarks of a powerless, attention-seeking second-tier GOP candidate than they are by the most powerful leader on earth's abetting Iranians' objective of placing themselves on the threshold of nuclear weapons. In a study by Bar-Ilan professors, we find that adult children of Holocaust survivors are more concerned about the threat of a nuclear Iran than those whose parents were not survivors.

But this is par for the course. Huckabee is a gift to an Obamaphilic media, allowing them to emote, grandstand and distract. Look! He's out-Trumping Donald Trump! Admittedly, I have no way to precisely quantify this next assertion, but there is almost no way that the media have spent as much time contemplating the horrendous details of the Iran deal as they have gawking over Huckabee the past few days. How many of the voters now familiar with Huckabee's comment understand that there is a secret side deal between the International Atomic Energy Agency and Tehran? How many Americans outraged by Huckabee's comment know that the IAEA will rely on Iran to collect samples at one of its military bases? Do they know that we will give the Iranian regime hundreds of billions of dollars to fund Hamas and Hezbollah -- organizations that aren't squeamish about expressing their views on a second Holocaust?

As many other anti-Semites do, the Iranian government has denied that 6 million Jews were exterminated in Europe, in an attempt to weaken the case for Zionism and the need for a Jewish homeland. The idea that Jews have a duty to pre-emptively defend themselves when threatened is predicated on this recent history, and Iranian mullahs know it. Nowadays, the mullahs threaten in various ways to bring about a second Holocaust. And the same administration that trusts Iran to uphold its end of an agreement doesn't believe that Iran is earnest about its project to destroy the Jewish state.

Huckabee's remark was unhelpful in the way that conjuring up the Holocaust to make political points always is predictably unhelpful -- even if, believe it or not, there are events that are historically analogous. Accusing the president of marching Jews "to the door of the oven" suggests that the president is interested in starting genocide on purpose, as opposed to suggesting that he is gullible or incompetent or subscribing to a dangerous philosophy when it comes to the Middle East. Ultimately, though, Huckabee is wrong about one other thing: Jews can't be marched to the doors of an oven anymore. That's the point of Israel. And that's why this deal may facilitate a war. But don't let that get in the way of focusing on what's important, media.

]]>mark.donahoohatchell+DavidHarsanyi@gmail.com (David Harsanyi)Media IssuesFri, 31 Jul 2015 05:03:31 +0000Is Destruction of Records Congenital to Liberals?http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/2702-is-destruction-of-records-congenital-to-liberals
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/2702-is-destruction-of-records-congenital-to-liberalsIs concealment and destruction of official government records somehow congenital to the contemporary political left, or at least anyone associated with Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton?

One might reasonably infer so, given the festering scandals surrounding IRS persecution of conservative organizations and Hillary Clinton's emails during her tenure as Secretary of State.

In fact, the malfeasance dates back even further. Recall how Clinton claimed for years that relevant Rose Law Firm records were lost, up until they were miraculously discovered in an upstairs bedroom of the White House itself.

In encouraging news this week, however, federal judges in separate proceedings reached the end of their patience regarding the IRS malfeasance and Clinton's email discovery. In an extraordinary display of disgust that makes for entertaining reading for anyone outraged by either matter, the judge in the IRS case threatened to hold IRS commissioner John Koskinen in contempt of court:

"As expressed at the hearing, the Government's reasoning is nonsensical. Officers of the Court who fail to comply with Court orders will be held in contempt. Also, in the event of non-compliance with future Court orders, the Commissioner of the IRS and others shall be directed to show cause as to why they should not be held in contempt of Court. The Court's July 1, 2015 ruling from the bench stands: (1) the Government shall produce relevant documents every Monday; (2) the Government's document production shall be accompanied by a status report that indicates (a) whether TIGTA has turned over any new documents to the IRS, (b) if so, the number of documents, and (c) a timeframe for the IRS's production of those documents.

Signed by Judge Emmet G. Sullivan on July 29, 2015."

Even more extraordinarily, Judge Sullivan threatened to actually jail the IRS's attorney upon further noncompliance:

"If there is further noncompliance, I will haul into court the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service to show cause why that person should not be personally held in contempt of court. I can't make that any clearer. Is there any part of what I just said unclear? But think about these court orders. They're enforceable. You're in a very difficult position, but you're walking out of court with your colleagues. That might not always be the case, okay?"

It bears emphasis that Judge Sullivan was appointed by Bill Clinton, undermining any suggestion that he's on some sort of Tea Party crusade.

Elsewhere this week, the judge overseeing production of Clinton's State Department emails expressed similar intolerance toward needless delay and also threatened his own court order mandating faster compliance.

That proceeding stems from a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) related lawsuit filed by the Associated Press (AP) in March of this year. Among other official records, the AP sought documents reflecting Clinton's communications with high-level State Department aides, scheduling and calendar records, items regarding the Osama bin Laden operation, government surveillance and other relevant records. Some of the requests date all the way back to 2010, and the lawsuit itself began after Clinton admitted earlier this year that she used a personal email server during her tenure.

In a hearing to address production delays, Judge Richard Leon expressed incredulity and went so far as to observe that compliance could be achieved in mere days "by the least ambitious bureaucrat."

Meanwhile, a highly-publicized new report from Inspector General Charles McCullough concluded that Clinton also conducted classified State Department business via her private email, contrary to her earlier unequivocal assurances.

Back in March when the email controversy forced her to finally address the matter before reporters, Clinton claimed that, "I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material." The IG, however, reached a different conclusion. After inspecting just 40 emails out of 30,000 exchanged during Clinton's tenure, four "were classified when they were sent and are classified now."

It's anybody's guess how much other classified information will be discovered following inspection of the remaining 30,000 unreviewed emails, although the Chinese and Russians already probably have a pretty good idea.

All of this stonewalling constitutes a grave violation of public trust and respect for the rule of law. It is not something that should be tolerated by the American people, but it's refreshing that the judicial branch appears intent on pursuing just resolution.

A recent survey from Rasmussen suggests that the public by more than a 2-to-1 margin is similarly skeptical, despite Obama's protestations that there's "not a smidgen of evidence" of corruption in the IRS scandal. Fully 52% of respondents believe the IRS broke the law in targeting conservative groups, while just 24% believe it did not.

In a notable twist, this week also marks the 40th anniversary of Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance in 1975. It is an interesting question whether his body will be discovered before we finally obtain the relevant records in the IRS targeting and Clinton email scandals. But at least Judges Sullivan and Leon are doing their part.

]]>tlee@cfif.org (Timothy H. Lee)State of AffairsThu, 30 Jul 2015 20:00:25 +0000Bernie Sanders: Socialist, Nationalist, Romantichttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/2700-bernie-sanders-socialist-nationalist-romantic
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/2700-bernie-sanders-socialist-nationalist-romanticBernie Sanders is attracting crowds. The avowed socialist U.S. Senator from Vermont may be running a long-shot campaign to upset Hillary Clinton’s acclamation as the Democratic Party’s nominee for president next year, but what he lacks in polish and money he more than makes up for in enthusiastic grassroots support.

Last year, he was pulling 200 or 300 people to his rallies for liberal Democratic candidates around the United States. Now he’s drawing thousands—10,000 in New Hampshire in June; 11,000 in Phoenix last week; 8,000 in Dallas a few weeks ago. On Wednesday, he drew more than 1,000 people in the former Republican stronghold of Orange County, California.

And what is Sanders saying that Clinton and other Democrats are not?

Sanders is a socialist. In an interview with Ezra Klein of Vox.com this week, Sanders explained that being a socialist means emulating other socialist countries such as Finland, Norway and Sweden.

“[W]hat you find is that in virtually all of those countries, health care is a right of all people and their systems are far more cost-effective than ours, college education is virtually free in all of those countries, people retire with better benefits, wages that people receive are often higher, distribution of wealth and income is much fairer, their public education systems are generally stronger than ours.”

Sanders is also a romantic. He hasn’t much use for free markets, which he suspects are rigged for the benefit of the rich. He is unsurprisingly in favor of single-payer health care, and believes prescription drugs should be subject to price controls—which are guaranteed to restrict supplies and squelch innovation.

His thoughts on public education are telling, insofar as they tell us very little beyond the fact that Sanders thinks education is a fundamental right: “I don’t know how you have the United States being competitive in a global economy if we do not have the best-educated workforce in the world. What does that mean? It means that everybody should be able to get all of the education they need, regardless of the income of their families.”

Does that mean Sanders supports school choice? Of course not. He voted against the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which allows low-income, mostly black and Hispanic families to send their children to a private or parochial school of their choice. In fact, he has consistently opposed school choice programs.

Sanders is also a nationalist. National Review editor-at-large Kevin Williamson wrote a dynamite cover story for the magazine’s July 2 issue that made the connection explicit: “He is, in fact, leading a national-socialist movement, which is a queasy and uncomfortable thing to write about a man who is the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and whose family was murdered in the Holocaust. But there is no other way to characterize his views and his politics.”

The problem with referring to Sanders as a national-socialist is that obvious association people make with Hitler, the German Nazi Party, and the Holocaust. Genocide tends to be a conversation-stopper. But the fact is, national-socialism exists to this day. Syria under the Assads is a national-socialist regime. Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a national-socialist regime.

But Sanders’ brand of national-socialism is American through and through. Williamson points to Sanders’ “incessant reliance on xenophobic (and largely untrue) tropes” blaming the Chinese, Mexicans and other foreigners for the nation’s economic sluggishness.

“If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country,” Sanders told Klein, “you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people. What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don't believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs.”

That’s a cartoon caricature of the conservative take on immigration. Conservatives disagree on immigration reform. Many conservatives oppose opening the borders, but support a more rational system that allows highly skilled immigrants to come to this country to make a living.

Yet from the left’s perspective, Sanders is just talking good sense. “What is remarkable about Sanders's platform is how unremarkable it would sound to any run-of-the-mill Democratic politician 40 years ago,” observed the left-wing writer Charles Pierce at Esquire, “and how moderate it would have sounded to Eugene V. Debs, the last major Socialist candidate for president.”

Americans are primed for a populist message, which is one reason Donald Trump has caught fire with a sizable minority of Republicans. But are Americans keen to elect a socialist who peddles populist rhetoric?

Not likely. Sanders and Trump are tapping a growing dissatisfaction among Americans who believe, with good reason, that their government holds them in contempt. But Sanders’ remedy for out-of-touch government is more government. Power to the people is power to the bureaucracy. Socialism, at bottom, is subjugation.

]]>mark.donahoohatchell+bboychuk@gmail.com (Ben Boychuk)State of AffairsThu, 30 Jul 2015 17:09:39 +0000The Iran Deal and America’s Crisis of Self-Governmenthttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/45-foreign-policy/2699-the-iran-deal-and-americas-crisis-of-self-government
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/45-foreign-policy/2699-the-iran-deal-and-americas-crisis-of-self-governmentThere are plenty of good reasons to be depressed over the recent deal hammered out in Vienna to address Iran’s nuclear program. For one, it bears the imprimatur of President Obama who, as the Bowe Berghdal swap and the Cuba deal illustrate, is a master of “buy high, sell low” negotiations.

For another, the negative implications for Middle Eastern security are almost too numerous to count: a virtually inevitable nuclear arms race that could include the likes of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey; hundreds of billions of dollars in sanctions relief that Iran can use to fund terrorist groups throughout the region; and a legitimization of the mullahs’ rule that shrinks the prospect of regime change in Tehran to almost zero.

Yet there’s another aspect of this process that ought to concern any American conscious of the fragility of our system of self-government: a wholesale abandonment of the rule of law.

At the moment, Congress is reviewing the Iran deal and preparing for a vote that must take place by the end of September. Should the legislative branch reject the deal, President Obama could then veto their decision — at which point 2/3 majorities in both the House and the Senate would be required to overrule the White House. This process is an embarrassment.

Here’s why: Under the terms of the Constitution, presidents are required to submit treaties to the Senate, where a 2/3 majority is necessary to ratify the agreement. That means that, under standard procedures, President Obama could not implement this agreement unless he won over every single member of the Democratic Caucus in the upper chamber as well as 11 Republicans. That, needless to say, would not happen.

Because this administration hasn’t the slightest regard for the rule of law, however, President Obama simply sidestepped that process by declaring that the deal with Iran is not, in fact, a treaty. With Congress scared that they would be completely cut out of the process, Republican Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee advanced the bill that set up the current system: one in which 2/3 of both houses are required to stop an agreement rather than 2/3 of just the Senate being necessary to approve it.

This is a total inversion of the constitutional practice. Under these rules, President Obama will have his deal as long as he can persuade a scant 34 senators or 145 House members to go along. It turns out that winning is quite easy when you can change the rules in the middle of the game.

Here’s the problem: A system such as ours is reliant in some measure on soft norms of civic forbearance. When you push the system too hard — when you start eroding the trust that is necessary to get strong partisans to at least consent to a common set of rules — you send institutions spinning off into chaos.

Yet President Obama has never blinked at that prospect. This is the guy who decided that the president could tell the Senate when it was or wasn’t in session. This is the guy who — contradicting dozens of statements he had previously made to the contrary — decided he could upend immigration laws by executive fiat without any role for the Congress. And now this is the guy who’s decided that the treaty power doesn’t apply to him when it’s politically inconvenient.

Make no mistake — these problems are not limited to the executive branch. We’ve just concluded a Supreme Court session in which the two most prominent decisions involved a majority of justices flamboyantly dispensing with the idea that they’re bound by the text of the Constitution or unambiguous statutes. And Congress, for its part, has become by far the weakest of the three branches, with many of its traditional powers now having been annexed by the federal bureaucracy and with its oversight of those bodies proving feckless.

We are at a crisis point in American government. With all three branches in the grips of systematic dysfunction, the system of checks and balances is beginning to lose its power to make course corrections. The only rehabilitative measure left at that point is a backlash from the American people — one that insists that our public offices be populated exclusively by those who take the obligations imposed by the Constitution seriously. Failing that, this effort is sunk. America is just another country.

Benjamin Franklin famously described our system of government as “A republic … if you can keep it.” Without a civic renaissance in the next decade or two, there’s a very real chance that we’ll have failed Dr. Franklin’s test.

]]>mhatchell3@cfif.com (Troy Senik)Foreign PolicyThu, 30 Jul 2015 16:21:06 +0000Obama Cronyism + Your Personal Data = Troublehttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/2697-obama-cronyism-your-personal-data-trouble
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/2697-obama-cronyism-your-personal-data-troubleIt's the most far-reaching scandal in Washington that no one wants to talk about: Tens of millions of federal employees had their personal information hacked as a result of Obama administration incompetence and political favoritism.

Ethnic community organizer-turned-Office of Personnel Management head Katherine Archuleta recklessly eschewed basic cybersecurity in favor of politically correct "diversity" initiatives during her disastrous crony tenure. This Beltway business-as-usual created an irresistible opportunity for hackers to reach out and grab massive amounts of sensitive data -- compromising everyone from rank-and-file government employees to CIA spies.

Could it get worse? You betcha.

Amid increasing concerns about these massive government computer breaches, the Defense Department is expected to announce the winner of a lucrative high-stakes contract to overhaul the military's electronic health records system this week.

The leading finalist among three top contenders is Epic Systems, a Wisconsin-based health care software company founded and led by top Obama billionaire donor Judy Faulkner. Thanks in significant part to President Obama's $19 billion stimulus subsidy program for health data vendors, Epic is now the dominant EMR player in the U.S. health IT market.

According to Becker's Hospital Review, CVS Caremark's retail clinic chain, MinuteClinic, is now adopting Epic's system, and "when the transition is complete, about 51 percent of Americans will have an Epic record." Other major clients include Kaiser Permanente of Oakland, Calif., Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, Arlington-based Texas Health Resources, Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Mount Sinai Health System in New York City, and Duke University Health System in Raleigh, N.C.

As I've reported previously, Epic employees donated nearly $1 million to political parties and candidates between 1995 and 2012 -- 82 percent of it to Democrats. The company's top 10 PAC recipients are all Democratic or left-wing outfits, from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (nearly $230,000) to the DNC Services Corporation (nearly $175,000) and the America's Families First Action Fund Democratic super-PAC ($150,000). Faulkner received a plum appointment to a federal health IT policy panel in 2011. Brandon Glenn of Medical Economics noted that "it's not a coincidence" that Epic's sales "have been skyrocketing in recent years, up to $1.2 billion in 2011, double what they were four years prior."

Stunningly, Epic "has the edge" on the gargantuan Pentagon medical records contract, The Washington Post reported on Monday. This favored status comes despite myriad complaints about the interoperability, usability and security of Epic's closed-end proprietary software. Just last week, the UCLA Health system run by Epic suffered a cyber attack affecting up to 4.5 million personal and medical records, including Social Security numbers, Medicare and health plan identifiers, birthdays, and physical addresses. The university's CareConnect system spans four hospitals and 150 offices across Southern California.

The university's top doctors and medical staff market their informatics expertise and consulting services to other Epic customers "to ensure the successful implementation and optimization of your Epic EHR." Will they be sharing their experience having to mop up the post-cyber attack mess involving their Epic infrastructure?

UCLA Health acknowledged that the hack forced it to "employ more cybersecurity experts on its internal security team, and to hire an outside cybersecurity firm to guard its network," according to CNN.

Now another Obama crony is poised to cash in on her cozy ties and take over the mega-overhaul of millions of Pentagon and Veterans Affairs medical records to the tune of at least $11 billion.

]]>mark.donahoohatchell+MichelleMalkin@gmail.com (Michelle Malkin)State of AffairsWed, 29 Jul 2015 05:02:40 +0000Documented Irresponsibilityhttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/58-immigration/2696-documented-irresponsibility
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/58-immigration/2696-documented-irresponsibilityPeople who entered the United States illegally may be called "undocumented" in politically correct circles, but what is all too well documented is the utter irresponsibility of both political parties in dealing with immigration issues.

Both Democratic and Republican administrations have left the border with Mexico porous for years -- porous not just for Mexicans but for anybody else, including terrorists from the Middle East.

Two very different issues have gotten jumbled together in the political stew called "comprehensive immigration reform." The first and most fundamental issue is whether we are going to have an immigration policy at all. The second issue is: Just what should that immigration policy be?

If we do not control our own border, then we do not have any immigration policy. We may have immigration laws on the books, but if anybody can cross the border that wants to, those laws are just words on paper and a bad joke.

Polls showing the surprisingly favorable reactions of some Republican voters to Donald Trump's irresponsible generalities about immigrants probably reflect many people's frustrations with politicians' weasel words on the subject, and politicians' failure to do anything about a festering problem.

The recent murder of Kate Steinle in San Francisco by an illegal immigrant with multiple felonies and multiple expulsions, followed by multiple illegal returns to this "sanctuary city," has been galling to many people.

One immediate consequence of this outrage has been a drive to pass "Kate's law" prescribing mandatory prison time for anyone who has been expelled from this country and comes back again illegally. That is overdue.

It is a painful sign of the deterioration of respect for law that a new law has to be passed to prevent a "sanctuary city" from obstructing justice, which is already a crime.

The larger issue is control of our own borders. We can debate forever whether building a fence is the best way to do that. But too much time has been wasted already.

One thing is certain. Building a fence won't hurt. If other things can be done to secure the border, then do those things as well. The American people deserve some concrete reassurance that Congress is finally getting serious.

Donald Trump's sweeping smear of immigrants does not need to be answered by an equally sweeping celebration of immigrants. Nor should we use the old cop-out that "the truth lies somewhere in between." The truth is wherever you find it. But too many politicians of both parties do not even want to look for the truth.

Instead of holding extensive Congressional hearings, airing all the arguments pro and con on immigration issues, and bringing out all the available facts, some politicians seek to rush through "comprehensive immigration reform" -- meaning some sweeping legislation that neither the public nor the Congress has had time to consider.

Congress did that when it passed ObamaCare. Do we want to let immigration laws become something else that we learn about only after the fact, when it is too late?

No doubt immigrants, like any other large group of human beings, range from some of the best people to some of the worst. But it makes a huge difference what the proportions are.

What are the crime rates, the disease rates, the automobile fatality rates, the educational records of the children of immigrants from different countries?

Above all, we need the facts. There has been too much rhetoric already. If our politicians are too gutless to bring out the facts, perhaps some think tank or television station can hold an hour-long debate between some proponent of expansive immigration and some opponent.

Jason Riley of the Manhattan Institute has written a book titled "Let Them In" and columnist Ann Coulter has written a book on the other side titled "Adios, America." Both cite empirical studies.

A spirited debate between knowledgeable and articulate advocates could bring out which evidence stands up under scrutiny and which does not. Regardless of who might "win" the debate, we could all become more enlightened. This issue needs all the light it can get.

]]>mark.donahoohatchell+ThomasSowell@gmail.com (Thomas Sowell)ImmigrationTue, 28 Jul 2015 05:09:19 +0000Americans Understand Iran a Lot Better Than John Kerryhttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/45-foreign-policy/2691-americans-understand-iran-a-lot-better-than-john-kerry
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/45-foreign-policy/2691-americans-understand-iran-a-lot-better-than-john-kerryAt a Tehran mosque last week, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei -- amid chants of "death to America" and "death to Israel" -- explained to a crowd that his nation's interests are "180 degrees" in opposition to the United States. "Even after this deal, our policy toward the arrogant U.S. will not change," he explained.

This vexed Secretary of State John Kerry, who claimed that he didn't "know how to interpret" this kind of predictable antagonism from one of America's longest-running adversaries.

What can it all possibly mean?

Perhaps the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran does not feel compelled to indulge in American fairy tale endings. Khamenei knows there is almost no way sanctions will return, even if he cheats. He understands his nation will be poised to have nuclear weapons in a decade, at the latest. Few people, even advocates of the P5+1 deal, argue we can stop the mullahs in the long run. Best-case scenario, as Fred Kaplan contends in Slate, is that the Islamic regime will get bored of hating us and join the community of nations.

Speaking of wishful thinking, I suspect that many Americans are less confused about Iran's intentions than our gullible secretary of state, even if they support a deal for partisan reasons. Take a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll that tells us a couple of things -- neither being what fans of the deal purpose. Americans -- though most don't know much about foreign affairs, much less grasp the intricacies of this Iranian deal -- intuitively understand Iran's Islamic Republic better than Kerry.

When asked about the deal and given the administration's framing of it, 56 percent said they support it.

But of course, the debate is the question. And this one is lacking vital context. The debate is about international inspectors and their ability to get the job done. We know those sanctions will be almost impossible to re-engage once the United Nations lifts them. Nor did the question let on what we have given up: The deal lifts an embargo on ballistic weapons in under a decade; we allow Iran to keep 6,000 centrifuges, which could allow the country to be on the threshold of nuclear weapons; and we are reinstating $140 billion that Iran can use, as Kerry has pointed out, in aiding proxies as the largest state funder of terrorism in the world.

That's if the regime keeps its promises. Here's the second question in that Washington Post-ABC News poll:

How confident are you that this agreement will prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons?

Sixty-four percent are not confident that Iran will not produce or acquire highly enriched uranium. Do these people realize that the entire point of this deal -- as laid out by President Barack Obama and his surrogates -- is to stop the Iranians from obtaining nuclear weapons? It's not as if we brought home any hostages or put an end to Iran's actions in Bahrain, Yemen or Lebanon. How could they support a deal that they claim won't work? I suspect it's because the first question is a theoretical framework. The second question can be based on evidence.

The Pew Research Center offers a more fully realized view of American opinion on the matter. Among the 79 percent of Americans who have heard about the agreement, only 38 percent approve, whereas 48 percent disapprove, and 14 percent do not offer an opinion. Only 26 percent of those who claim to have heard at least a little about the agreement contend that they have a "great deal" or "fair amount" of confidence that Iran's leaders will abide by its terms.

But for the most part, liberal pundits do not argue, as Kerry does, that this pact will stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons in the long run. Instead, we are bombarded with a fallacy: Do you want war, or do you want this deal? Well, there are thousands of positions a person can have between bringing an entire nation into submission and our own capitulation -- for example, continuing sanctions, increasing sanctions or even negotiating a better agreement.

Kerry says a veto override would mean Iran would only become stronger. But is an override even a possibility? Thanks to Sens. Bob Corker and Mitch McConnell's ceding all power on the issue to the president, it seems improbable. Although, using a vote in the United Nations to create inevitability rather than first allowing debate in Congress not only demonstrates Obama's contempt for process but also may be the pretext some apprehensive Democrats need to oppose the deal. And such bad polling as we've seen so far will go a long way in determining whether the Sen. Chuck Schumers of the world capitulate to the pressure coming from the administration.

For now, though, it seems that the American public is realistic about Iran's intentions -- or at least more realistic than our secretary of state pretends to be.

]]>mark.donahoohatchell+DavidHarsanyi@gmail.com (David Harsanyi)Foreign PolicyFri, 24 Jul 2015 05:01:48 +0000Meet the Censors: The Harvard Law Prof Who Would Reshape American Politicshttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/52-campaign-finance/2689-meet-the-censors-the-harvard-law-prof-who-would-reshape-american-politics
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/52-campaign-finance/2689-meet-the-censors-the-harvard-law-prof-who-would-reshape-american-politicsMeet Lawrence Lessig. A decade ago, the Harvard Law professor was a prominent legal scholar in the field of copyright, intellectual property, and privacy rights. Then he had a revelatory encounter with Aaron Swartz, a brilliant young left-wing Internet activist whose life was tragically cut short by suicide in 2013.

As Lessig told the story in a widely noticed TED talk last year, Swartz persuaded him that his academic work would come to naught as long as “there’s this fundamental corruption in the way our government works.” And so Lawrence Lessig, campaign finance crusader, was born.

At the heart of the campaign finance reform movement is the unshakable belief that that corporations and other large, unaccountable “special interests” are killing the republic. The only cure is to remove “big money” from politics, whether by limiting how much donors can give a candidate, capping how much a candidate may spend, or eliminating private donations altogether in favor of taxpayer-financed campaigns.

Lessig in his TED talk cited a poll in which 96 percent of Americans say it’s “important to reduce the influence of money in politics.” That is an incredible number that elides certain distinctions, namely: how important?

The good professor went on to say, “politicians and pundits tell you, there’s nothing we can do about this issue, Americans don’t care about it, but the reason for that is that 91 percent of Americans think there's nothing that can be done about this issue.” Another incredible number, albeit somewhat more realistic. Here the question would be: What does “nothing” mean? And could it be that “nothing” is better — or at least safer — than any of the reforms currently on offer?

At that same talk, Lessig announced the formation of a Super PAC aimed at taking on other Super PACs. The group, which kicked off on May 1 last year, is called Mayday. Its aim is to elect people to Congress who will make curbing the power of big donors and lobbyists their top priority.

Mayday so far has been a big bust. Lessig and his partner, Republican strategist Mark McKinnon, managed only to raise $10 million to aid a slate of candidates that, with a few exceptions, lost handily. Turns out, widespread grassroots interest in an anti-Super PAC Super Pac exists more in the imagination of would-be reformers than in reality.

Politico reported after November’s midterms, a fair amount of Mayday’s funding came “in the form of big six figure checks from donors like BuzzFeed co-founder John Johnson, Twitter and Tumblr investor Fred Wilson, green energy executive David Milner and Ian Simmons, the husband of Hyatt hotel heiress Liesel Pritzker Simmons.”

Well, so much for that! But Lessig is undaunted and Mayday is still seeking support, proving for the umpteenth time that a fool and his money are soon parted.

Lessig returned this week with an op-ed in the New York Times again touting the urgency of reform as a keystone of the 2016 presidential election. Unlike many reformers, Lessig doesn’t think sundry presidential candidates’ talk of amending the Constitution is serious. “It sounds appealing, but anyone who’s serious about reform should not buy it,” he writes. “For a presidential candidate, constitutional reform is fake reform. And no candidate who talks exclusively about amending the Constitution can be considered a credible reformer.”

The key word for Lessig is exclusively. In fact, Lessig makes a lengthy case for a constitutional convention in his 2012 book, Republic Lost. And as Lessig goes on to argue in his Times op-ed, constitutional amendments—plural!—“will be essential to restoring this democracy, just as a healthy diet is essential to the recovery of a patient who has suffered a heart attack.”

But Lessig allows that even a constitutional amendment such as the one introduced every year since 2011 by Senator Tom Udall, D-N.M., to slay the hobgoblin to reformers that is Citizens United v. FEC “would not solve the problem of money’s influence in American politics.”

Lessig’s aspirations are higher. He wants nothing less than a radical transformation of the practice of American politics. “Real reform,” he writes, “will require changing the way campaigns are funded — moving from large-dollar private funding to small-dollar public funding.”

Public funding of campaigns is an old idea that liberal campaign finance reformers hold near and dear. Teddy Roosevelt, the Bull Moose progressive himself, argued in his 1907 State of the Union, “The need for collecting large campaign funds would vanish if Congress provided an appropriation for the proper and legitimate expenses of each of the great national parties.” More than a century of campaign finance laws later, Lessig is making the identical case.

Lessig suggests public campaign financing could be accomplished by amending the tax code to offer rebates for political contributions, perhaps along the lines of the charitable contributions deduction. He’s also favorable to the public financing scheme suggested by U.S. Representative John Sarbanes, D-Md., that would have the government provide a nine-to-one match to candidates who agree to accept only small donations.

Ultimately, the public-financing project fails because it falls afoul of the “if only” fallacy. If only we could get big money out of politics, American democracy would be restored to its former luster. If only we could limit how much money independent groups spend on political campaigns, our elections would be much cleaner. If only we could amend the Constitution to undo decades of Supreme Court decisions we don’t like, politics would be free from — or at least much less beholden to — the scourge of special interests. And so on.

Would a small tax rebate encourage more individuals to give a couple of hundred dollars to a candidate? Maybe. But that assumes many more voters would be engaged enough to make writing the check worthwhile. It also doesn’t take account of the fact that the groups that already exist to promote a cause or an interest — political action committees, unions, citizens groups, trade associations, and the like — would still have a vast advantage in terms of expertise and organization.

Unless, of course, you could ban those groups or regulate them into submission through a constitutional amendment.

When you cut through the lofty language about weeding out corruption and purifying democracy, you’re left with the inescapable conclusion that making politics safe for democracy requires a great deal more coercion and quite a bit less freedom than the Lawrence Lessigs of the world let on.

]]>mark.donahoohatchell+bboychuk@gmail.com (Ben Boychuk)Campaign FinanceThu, 23 Jul 2015 16:32:52 +0000The Fact-Free Left: Part IIhttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/2690-the-fact-free-left-part-ii
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/2690-the-fact-free-left-part-iiThere is no way to know what is going on in someone else's mind. But sometimes their behavior tells you more than their words.

The political left's great claim to authenticity and honor is that what they advocate is for the benefit of the less fortunate. But how could we test that?

T.S. Eliot once said, "Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm -- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves."

This suggests that one way to find out if those who claim to be trying to help the less fortunate are for real is to see if they are satisfied to simply advocate a given policy, and see it through to being imposed -- without also testing empirically whether the policy is accomplishing what it set out to do.

The first two steps are enough to let advocates feel important and righteous. Whether you really care about what happens to the supposed beneficiaries of the policy is indicated by whether you bother to check out the empirical evidence afterwards.

Many, if not most, people who are zealous advocates of minimum wage laws, for example, never check to see if these laws do more good by raising some workers' wages than harm by preventing many young and inexperienced workers from finding jobs.

One of my own pieces of good fortune, when I left home at age 17, was that the unemployment rate for black 17-year-old males was in single digits that year -- for the last time. The minimum wage law was ten years old, and the wage specified in that law was now so low that it was irrelevant, after years of inflation. It was the same as if there were no minimum wage law.

Liberals, of course, wanted the minimum wage raised, to keep up with inflation. The result was that, ten years later, the unemployment rate for black 17-year-old males was 27.5 percent -- and it has never been less than 20 percent in all the years since then.

As the minimum wage kept getting raised, so did the unemployment rate for black 17-year-old males. In 1971 it was 33.4 percent -- and it has never been under 30 percent since then. It has often been over 40 percent and, occasionally, over 50 percent.

But people who advocate minimum wage laws seldom show any interest in the actual consequences of such laws, which include many idle young males on the streets, which does no good for them or for their communities.

Advocates talk about people who make minimum wages as if they are a permanent class of people. In reality, most are young inexperienced workers, and no one stays young permanently. But they can stay inexperienced for a very long time, damaging their prospects of getting a job and increasing their chances of getting into trouble, hanging out with other idle and immature males.

There is the same liberal zeal for government intervention in housing markets, and the same lack of interest in checking out what the actual consequences are for the people who are supposed to be the beneficiaries of government housing policies, whether as tenants or home buyers.

Government pressures and threats forced mortgage lenders to lower their lending standards, to allow more low-income and minority applicants to qualify. But, after the housing boom became a bust, the biggest losers were low-income and minority home buyers, who were unable to keep up the payments and lost everything -- which was the very reason they were turned down before lending standards were lowered.

Rent control laws have led to housing shortages in cities around the world. More than a thousand apartment buildings have been abandoned by their owners in New York alone -- more than enough to house all the homeless in the city.

High tax rates on "the rich" -- however defined -- are an ever popular crusade on the left. Who cares about the consequences -- such as the rich investing their money overseas, where it will create jobs and economic growth in other countries, while American workers are unemployed and American economic growth is anemic?

All these policies allow the political left to persist in their fact-free visions. And those visions in turn allow the left to feel good about themselves, while leaving havoc in their wake.

]]>mark.donahoohatchell+ThomasSowell@gmail.com (Thomas Sowell)State of AffairsThu, 23 Jul 2015 13:33:19 +0000The Fact-Free Lefthttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/2687-the-fact-free-left
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/2687-the-fact-free-leftThe outrage over another multiple murder of American military personnel on American soil by another Islamic extremist has been exacerbated by the fact that these military people had been ordered to be unarmed -- and therefore sitting ducks.

Millions of American civilians have also been forbidden to have guns, and are also sitting ducks -- for criminals, terrorists or psychos.

You might think that, before having laws or policies forcing fellow human beings to be defenseless targets, those who support such laws and policies would have some factual basis for believing that these gun restrictions save more lives, on net balance, than allowing more legal access to firearms. But you would be wrong.

Most gun control zealots show not the slightest interest in testing empirically their beliefs or assumptions. There have been careful factual studies by various scholars of what happens after gun control laws have been instituted, strengthened or reduced.

But those studies are seldom even mentioned by gun control activists. Somehow they just know that gun restrictions reduce gun crime, no matter how many studies show the opposite. How do they know? Because other like-minded people say so -- and say so repeatedly and loudly.

A few gun control advocates may cherry-pick examples of countries with stronger gun control laws than ours that have lower murder rates (such as England) -- and omit other countries with stronger gun control laws than ours that have far higher murder rates (such as Mexico, Russia and Brazil).

You don't test an assumption or belief by cherry-picking examples. Not if you are serious. And if you are not going to be serious about life and death, when are you going to be serious?

Unfortunately, gun control is just one of many issues on which the political left shows no real interest in testing their assumptions or beliefs. The left glorifies the 1960s as a turning point in American life. But they show no interest in testing whether things turned for the better or for the worse.

Homicide rates had been going down substantially, for decades on end -- among both blacks and whites -- until the 1960s. Plotted on a graph, there is a big U-shaped curve, showing the turnaround after the bright ideas of the left were applied to criminals in American courts of law in the 1960s.

This was not the only U-shaped curve, with its low, turnaround point in the 1960s. The same was true of the venereal disease gonorrhea, whose rate of infection went down in every year of the 1950s -- and then skyrocketed, beginning in the 1960s.

Teenage pregnancies had also been going down for years, until the late 1960s, when "sex education" was introduced in schools across the country. Then pregnancy rates rose nearly 50 percent over the next decade, among girls 15 to 19 years old -- exactly the opposite of what had been predicted by the left.

Another program that had the opposite effect from its advocates' claims was the "war on poverty" program created by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

Contrary to what was said during the celebrations of its 50th anniversary last year, the loudly proclaimed purpose of the "war on poverty" was not simply to transfer money or other benefits to the poor. Both Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and their supporters in Congress and in the media, all clearly stated that the central purpose of the "war on poverty" was to reduce dependency on government.

Both poverty and dependency on government had already been declining for years before this massive program began. The proportion of people whose earnings put them below the poverty level -- without counting government benefits -- declined by about one third from 1950 to 1965.

This was yet another beneficial trend that reversed itself after another bright idea of the left was put into practice in the 1960s. After half a century and trillions of dollars, the only response of the left has been to change the criteria, so that now the "war on poverty" could be portrayed as a success because it proved that, if you transferred more resources from X to Y, then Y would now have more resources. Who could have doubted that?

Changing the goal after the fact is just one of the ways the left has portrayed its failures as successes.

]]>mark.donahoohatchell+ThomasSowell@gmail.com (Thomas Sowell)State of AffairsWed, 22 Jul 2015 14:15:27 +0000A Historic Catastrophehttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/45-foreign-policy/2686-a-historic-catastrophe
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/45-foreign-policy/2686-a-historic-catastropheDistinguished scientist Freeman Dyson has called the 1433 decision of the emperor of China to discontinue his country's exploration of the outside world the "worst political blunder in the history of civilization."

The United States seems at this moment about to break the record for the worst political blunder of all time, with its Obama administration deal that will make a nuclear Iran virtually inevitable.

Already the years-long negotiations, with their numerous "deadlines" that have been extended again and again, have reduced the chances that Israel can destroy the Iranian nuclear facilities, which have been multiplied and placed in scattered underground sites during the years when all this was going on.

Israel is the only country even likely to try to destroy those facilities, since Iran has explicitly and repeatedly declared its intention to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.

How did we get to this point -- and what, if anything, can we do now? Tragically, these are questions that few Americans seem to be asking. We are too preoccupied with our electronic devices, the antics of celebrities and politics as usual.

During the years when we confronted a nuclear-armed Soviet Union, we at least realized that we had to "think the unthinkable," as intellectual giant Herman Kahn put it. Today it seems almost as if we don't want to think about it at all.

Our politicians have kicked the can down the road -- and it is the biggest, most annihilating explosive can of all, that will be left for our children and grandchildren to try to cope with.

Back in the days of our nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union, some of the more weak-kneed intelligentsia posed the choice as whether we wanted to be "red or dead." Fortunately, there were others, especially President Ronald Reagan, who saw it differently. He persevered in a course that critics said would lead to nuclear war. But instead it led to the peaceful conclusion of the Cold War.

President Barack Obama has been following opposite policies, and they are likely to lead to opposite results. The choices left after Iran gets nuclear bombs -- and intercontinental missiles that can deliver them far beyond Israel -- may be worse than being red or dead.

Bad as life was under the communists, it can be worse under nuclear-armed fanatics, who have already demonstrated their willingness to die -- and their utter barbarism toward those who fall under their power.

Americans today who say that the only alternative to the Obama administration's pretense of controlling Iran's continued movement toward nuclear bombs is war ignore the fact that Israel bombed Saddam Hussein's nuclear facilities, and Iraq did not declare war. To do so would have risked annihilation.

Early on, that same situation would have faced Iran. But Obama's years-long negotiations with Iran allowed the Iranian leaders time to multiply, disperse and fortify their nuclear facilities.

The Obama administration's leaking of Israel's secret agreement with Azerbaijan to allow Israeli warplanes to refuel there, during attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities, was a painfully clear sabotage of any Israeli attempt to destroy those Iranian facilities.

But the media's usual practice to hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil in the Obama administration buried this news, and allowed Obama to continue to pose as Israel's friend, just as he continued to assure Americans that, if they liked their doctor they could keep their doctor.

Some commentators have attributed Barack Obama's many foreign policy disasters to incompetence. But he has been politically savvy enough to repeatedly outmaneuver his opponents in America. For example, the Constitution makes it necessary for the President to get a two-thirds majority in the Senate to make any treaty valid. Yet he has maneuvered the Republican-controlled Congress into a position where they will need a two-thirds majority in both Houses to prevent his unilaterally negotiated agreement from going into effect -- just by not calling it a treaty.

If he is that savvy at home, why is he so apparently incompetent abroad? Answering that question may indeed require us to "think the unthinkable," that we have elected a man for whom America's best interests are not his top priority.

]]>mark.donahoohatchell+ThomasSowell@gmail.com (Thomas Sowell)Foreign PolicyTue, 21 Jul 2015 05:00:29 +0000Jihad on U.S. Troops Is Not a "Circumstance"http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/57-homeland-security/2685-jihad-on-us-troops-is-not-a-qcircumstanceq
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/57-homeland-security/2685-jihad-on-us-troops-is-not-a-qcircumstanceqFour U.S. Marines, barred from carrying weapons at naval training facilities despite explicit ISIS threats against our military, are dead in Tennessee. Another service member and a Chattanooga police officer survived gunshots after Thursday's two-stage massacre allegedly at the hands of 24-year-old jihadist Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez.

Navy Secretary Ray Mabus called the terrorist's spree "insidious and unfathomable." President Obama bemoaned the "heartbreaking circumstance" in which the murdered Marines found themselves.

Unfathomable"? Not if you've been paying attention. Islam-inspired hate crimes against our troops have continued unabated since the Obama White House first dismissed the 2009 Fort Hood massacre as "workplace violence."

Here's what's unfathomable: While the social justice warriors in Washington bend over backward to appease CAIR and Muslim civil rights absolutists, Americans in uniform are dying on American soil at the hands of Allah's homicidal avengers -- but the commander in chief couldn't even bother to deliver a live statement to the nation yesterday about the bloodshed.

"Heartbreaking circumstance"? Lightning strikes are random events of unfortunate circumstance. The concerted attacks and plots against our troops in their recruitment centers and on their bases here at home are outrageous acts of war.

Have you forgotten?

In June 2009, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad walked into an Arkansas Army recruiting center, murdered 24-year-old Pvt. William Long and gravely wounded 18-year-old Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula. He had planned on killing many more in the name of Allah. While the White House and media decried the "climate of hate" fostered by Christians, they whitewashed Muhammad's jihadi rage. Muhammad received a life sentence without parole for the act he himself described as a "jihadi attack on infidel forces."

It should be noted that Muhammad converted to Islam at Tennessee State University in Nashville and then became further radicalized in Yemen before returning to the U.S.

"The U.S. has to pay for the rape, murder, bloodshed, blasphemy it has done and still doing to the Muslims and Islam," Muhammad railed after carrying out his plot. "So consider this a small retaliation the best is to come Allah willing. This is not the first attack and won't be the last."

As I noted at the time, Obama could barely muster up a limp written statement expressing "sadness" over what he described as a "senseless act of violence" (instead of the intentional systematic act of Islamic terrorism that it was).

After the Little Rock ambush came the Baltimore military recruitment center bomb plot. Muslim convert Muhammad Hussain, 21, bragged on Facebook about his devotion to violent jihad. He "dialed a cellphone that he believed would ignite barrels of explosives packed into a sport utility vehicle," the Baltimore Sun recounted. "The SUV had been parked by the Armed Forces recruiting station at a strip mall in Catonsville, a bedroom suburb west of Baltimore." Hussain idolized Fort Hood jihadist Nidal Hasan and "thought about nothing but jihad."

In June 2011, the feds charged Muslim jihadists Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif and Walli Mujahidh of conspiring to use machine guns and grenades to "kill officers and employees of the Department of Defense who worked at the MEPS (Military Entrance Processing Stations) located in the Federal Center South building in Seattle, Wash., and to kill other persons assisting such officers and employees in the performance of their duties." They both pleaded guilty, but remained unrepentant and defiant.

In 2012, Ethiopian-born jihadist Jonathan Melaku pleaded guilty to shooting at the Pentagon, Marine and Coast Guard recruiting offices, and the National Museum of the Marine Corps, as well as trying to desecrate graves at Arlington National Cemetery containing the remains of U.S. veterans who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In April 2015, Mohammed Abdullah Hasan was arrested after the feds uncovered his ISIS-linked plot to kill American soldiers with a vehicle bomb at Fort Riley in Kansas.

ISIS hackers have explicitly targeted 100 U.S. service members whose personal details have been disseminated online. In May, the Pentagon raised the security threat level of military bases in the U.S. to "Force Protection Bravo" -- the third-highest threat level on a five-tier scale used by the Department of Defense.

You wouldn't know it from Obama's languid response.

Can someone ask the commander in chief: Do U.S. military lives matter enough yet to do more than issue a canned, obligatory condolence to the families of those who serve? How many more lives must be lost before he is as roused about our troops under jihad siege as he is about Bill Cosby, the Confederate flag, "Game of Thrones" or Caitlyn Jenner?

A question has hung in the air since Barack Obama first moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and began his "fundamental transformation" of this country: Did he intend harm, or was he merely so blinded by ideology that he could not see the damage his policies were creating? The Iran deal provides an answer.

At his press conference, our duplicitous leader chose to call black white and claim that the deal does the opposite of what it does — allow Iran to get nuclear weapons, albeit after a decent interval. We are deep into Orwellian territory now. "War is peace. Ignorance is strength." Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is crowing that Iran achieved all of its objectives and the U.S. none.

The bombproof facility in the mountain at Fordow — which, until recently, the U.S. had demanded be shuttered and locked — will now have an "international presence" so that attempts to thwart its progress even by sabotage will be effectively blocked. This is permission masquerading as prevention. It's of a piece with the administration's pressure on Israel to refrain from military action, which was rewarded with Obama aides calling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a "chicken" and crowing that his chance had passed.

Permission masquerading as prevention sums up the whole deal. The U.S. had demanded anywhere/anytime inspections and negotiated to lift sanctions only after evidence of Iranian compliance. Now, the inspections regime is a joke: Iran gets 24 days' notice and sits on the committee that decides whether inspections are necessary. The sanctions are lifted immediately, handing the world's chief sponsor of terror a $100 billion windfall. Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes, who was captured on videotape in April saying anytime/anywhere inspections would be required, now denies the U.S. ever made that a condition.

While the administration claimed it couldn't negotiate for the release of four Americans held unlawfully in Iranian prisons because that was outside the scope of nuclear negotiations, they did agree to lift the embargo on conventional arms and intercontinental ballistic missiles, which were also outside the compass of nuclear concerns. Why? Because "Iran demanded it." Well, OK then.

Obama's press conference was a spectacle of bad faith. A virtuoso of lip service (see his sympathy for Israel) and endless conjurer of straw men, he took few questions but silkily implied he had answered all objections. "There is no scenario in which a U.S. president is not in a stronger position 12, 13, 15 years from now if, in fact, Iran decided at that point they still wanted to get a nuclear weapon."

What? In 12 to 15 years, Iran will be an immensely wealthier, better-armed and more powerful country than it is today. It will be, to quote Obama, "a very successful regional power" and then some. It will have acquired advanced anti-aircraft weapons and ballistic missiles and, doubtless, a much-improved air force.

The dishonest core of the president's pretense is this: that the choice was between war and diplomacy. Every schoolchild knows that diplomacy without the credible threat of force is a nullity. Obama knows how to frighten and intimidate when he wants to. See his conduct toward Republicans or Netanyahu or the Supreme Court.

There was always a very different path available. He could have increased the sanctions instead of pleading with Congress not to impose them. He could have attacked Syria when it crossed his "red line" rather than folding and thereby conveying his fecklessness to Tehran. He could have refrained from calling everyone in the U.S. who favored a hard line against Iran a "warmonger" — again conveying that Iran had nothing to fear from him. He could have supported the protesters in the streets in 2009 rather than signaling his support for the regime. He could have left the negotiating table many times, but especially after the IAEA reported earlier this month that Iran was in violation of earlier nuclear treaties and had increased its stockpiles of enriched uranium by 20 percent. And yes, if all of the above failed, he could have deployed strategic bombing to destroy Iran's nuclear program.

But from his first inaugural address onward, Obama both secretly and openly wooed the Iranian regime. In the process, he repeatedly lied to Congress, our allies and the American people, settling, to my satisfaction at least, that he is inflicting this potential catastrophe wittingly.

]]>mark.donahoohatchell+MonaCharen@gmail.com (Mona Charen)Foreign PolicyFri, 17 Jul 2015 05:01:50 +0000Arne Duncan: School Choice for Me but Not for Theehttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/48-education/2680-arne-duncan-school-choice-for-me-but-not-for-thee
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/48-education/2680-arne-duncan-school-choice-for-me-but-not-for-theeU.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan will enroll his two children in the top-rated University of Chicago Laboratory Schools this fall, the Washington Postreported last week. Just about every parent wants the best for his kids. So it’s hardly surprising that a man of Duncan’s station would choose a school widely recognized as among the most innovative in the United States over one of Chicago’s struggling and often dangerous public schools.

And Duncan would have reason to know. He was the chief executive officer of the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) from 2001 until 2008.

Who in his right mind would subject his children to schools where just 65 percent of students graduate high school and, of those, more than 90 percent must take remedial courses in math and reading because they are nowhere near prepared for college-level work? Only about one-in-four of Chicago public high school students are ready for college, at least according to ACT standardized test scores.

Chicago’s public schools are so bad that even Chicago public school teachers refuse to subject their own offspring to the system’s depredations, if they can help it. A 2004 survey by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute found that 39 percent of the Second City’s teachers had enrolled their children in a private school.

So Duncan’s choice is understandable. It probably helped that he is also an alumnus of Lab, and his wife, Karen, works there.

The Lab Schools, which serve students from pre-kindergarten through the 12th grade, are bastions of progressive learning. The mission of the schools is to “ignite and nurture an enduring spirit of scholarship, curiosity, creativity, and confidence” and “value learning experientially, exhibiting kindness, and honoring diversity.”

Igniting and nurturing an enduring spirit of scholarship, curiosity and all of that good stuff isn’t cheap. Annual tuition at Lab runs north of $30,000. Oddly, running a third-rate public school system is almost as expensive as attending a first-rate private school. CPS spends about $24,000 per pupil every year.

Imagine what low-income parents could do for their children with that kind of money. Yet Duncan, a lifelong Democrat, would bar parents of lesser financial means from making just the sort of choice he and his wife are free to make without a second thought. “Honoring diversity” is nice as long as it remains confined to the realm of theory.

Fact is, Duncan and his boss, President Obama, are zealously anti-choice when it comes to education. Duncan at least sent his kids to a public school in Northern Virginia. The president’s daughters, Sasha and Malia, attended Lab before moving to Washington, D.C. in 2008, when they were enrolled in the exclusive Sidwell Friends School.

One of Duncan and Obama’s earliest policy moves was to end the District of Columbia’s Opportunity Scholarship Program, which granted low-income parents—primarily black and Hispanic—vouchers worth up to $7,500 a year to attend the private or religious school of their choice. A handful of those parents even managed to send their kids to Sidwell Friends, thanks to additional private scholarship assistance. Only through the machinations of some House Republicans and a few sympathetic Democrats in the Senate did the $11 million voucher program survive.

But Duncan and Obama’s opposition to choice doesn’t end there. Although it’s true that Duncan has supported charter schools throughout his tenure at CPS and the U.S. Department of Education, he is no friend of public school choice.

Last week, when the House of Representatives passed HR 5 to reauthorize No Child Left Behind, Duncan made a point of denouncing the bill’s “Title I portability,” which would allow a portion of federal dollars to follow low-income students to the public school of their choice.

Again, this isn’t even a question of sending tax dollars to private schools, which most Democrats and a fair number of libertarian-leaning Republicans oppose. Duncan labors under the widespread misapprehension, born of a career spent toiling in the government-school bureaucracy, that tax dollars are best distributed to institutions. Institutions are wise. Individuals are not. (Never mind individuals run those institutions.)

To change the way the federal government funds school districts would mean to deny special interests their due. But Duncan says Title I funding portability would be “devastating” to poor children—as if poor children and poor school districts are synonymous.

This is Arne Duncan’s idea of school choice: My children can go to the finest schools I can afford. Your tax dollars mustsupport schools the way we see fit. Your children must attend this third-rate neighborhood school. Your children may attend a charter school, as long as it conforms to the mandates we set. Your child mustlearn particular lessons in a particular way prescribed by the Common Core State Standards. Your child musttake these Common Core tests. Your children mustwork for my children someday.

On a more personal note, Mr. Will may be the foremost political influence on my own life. It was therefore profoundly disappointing to digest his column this week entitled "The 110-Year-Old Case that Still Inspires Supreme Court Debates."

The case to which Will refers in his title, attempting to defend the indefensible, is the rightfully discredited 1905 Supreme Court decision in Lochner v. New York. There, a narrow 5-4 Court majority overturned a New York state law imposing sanitary standards upon bakeries and capping workers' hours at 10 per day and 60 per week.

Such laws are commonplace and uncontroversial today, but a century ago triggered what the late Robert Bork labeled "an opinion whose name lives in the law as the symbol, indeed the quintessence, of judicial usurpation of power." The Lochner majority, substituting its subjective political and economic preferences for interpretation of constitutional text, held that the statute somehow interfered with "the right and liberty of the individual to contract."

The problem is that "the right and liberty of the individual to contract," while defensible as economic and social theory, appears nowhere in the Constitution itself. The Constitution is silent regarding such issues as bakery sanitation standards, minimum wages, overtime laws and the maximum hours per day or week that bakery employees should work. Accordingly, therein lies the peril of what we broadly label "judicial activism," when judges like the Lochner majority appoint themselves super-legislators from the bench instead of playing their rightful role as neutral arbiters of existing laws.

The Constitution prohibits certain things, such as cruel and unusual punishments or unreasonable searches and seizures. The Constitution also mandates certain things, such as equal protection of the laws or just compensation for the taking of private property. On remaining matters the Constitution is silent, leaving it to our representative democracy to enact laws so long as they do not violate its express provisions.

On that basis, the Founding Fathers carefully divided powers among the various branches, so it threatens our system of checks and balances whenever judges disregard their proper role of interpreting laws against the text of the Constitution and instead exercise powers more properly left to the legislative branch. As Bork cogently explained:

"The central problem for constitutional courts is the resolution of the 'Madisonian dilemma. The United States was founded as a Madisonian system, which means that it contains two opposing principles that must be continually reconciled. The first principle is self-government, which means in wide areas of life majorities are entitled to rule, if they wish, simply because they are majorities. The second is that there are nonetheless some things majorities must not do to minorities, some areas of life in which the individual must be free of majority rule. The dilemma is that neither majorities nor minorities can be trusted to define the proper spheres of democratic authority and individual liberty. To place that power in one or the other would risk either tyranny by the majority or tyranny by the minority."

In his column this week, however, Mr. Will jettisons that logic. He celebrates the Lochner decision because the bakery statute in question constituted "rent-seeking by large, unionized bakeries and their unions."

But many laws, if not most laws, can be characterized by critics as "rent-seeking," having "unjust consequences" or based upon "disreputable motives." That may render them unpalatable, but it doesn't make them unconstitutional. After all, there are any number of laws presumably favored by Mr. Will that others would slur as unjust or arising from disreputable motives, but one suspects that he'd disfavor judges overturning them solely on the basis of their own subjective political disagreement.

To be sure, Mr. Will has with justified zeal endeavored in recent years to disabuse conservatives and libertarians from their reflexively favorability toward "judicial restraint" and opposition toward "judicial activism." He correctly highlights how undue judicial deference toward legislative, executive and popular acts violates judges' proper duty under our constitutional system of checks and balances to overturn laws or regulations that violate specific rights protected against democratic encroachment. By way of recent example, look no further than the Supreme Court's latest ObamaCare decision, in which the majority spared the law the demise it deserved out of improper deference to a hypothesized Congressional intent that contravened the clear text of the statute itself.

But just as undue judicial restraint is to be lamented, so is undue judicial activism. Judges should interpret laws as objectively as possible, applying constitutional text to laws challenged before them.

Mr. Will asserts that "the United States urgently needs many judicial decisions as wise as Lochner," but the Founding Fathers had a better idea: a judicial branch that is neither too deferential nor too activist.

]]>tlee@cfif.org (Timothy H. Lee)State of AffairsThu, 16 Jul 2015 11:31:41 +0000Is the Civil War Over?http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/2677-is-the-civil-war-over
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/2677-is-the-civil-war-overIn the wake of the recent murders in a South Carolina church, the killer's hope of igniting a race war produced the opposite effect. Blacks and whites in South Carolina came together to condemn his act and the race hate behind it.

Some saw in the decision to remove the Confederate flag from in front of the state house a symbolic repudiation of the old South's racial past -- and the end of the Civil War. But, unfortunately, wars do not end until both sides decide that it is over.

The black parishioners who expressed forgiveness toward the killer did more than most of us could do, and the whites who responded with solidarity did their part. Note how quickly this was done, by ordinary people of good will -- black and white -- without the "help" of racial activists like Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson.

Professional race hustlers have no incentive to see our current civil war end. They see in this shooting only an opportunity to escalate their demands.

Now there are rumblings of demands that statues of Robert E. Lee and other Southern leaders be destroyed -- and if that is done, it will only lead to new demands, perhaps to destroy the Jefferson Memorial because Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. And if that is done, no doubt there will be demands that the city of Washington be renamed, for the same reason.

In short, there is no stopping point, just unending strife as far out as the eye can see. And just what will that accomplish? It could ultimately accomplish the killer's dream of racial polarization and violence.

Neither blacks nor whites will be better off if that happens. With all the very real problems in this society, can we really spare the time and the wasted energy of trying to refight a Civil War that ended before our great-grandparents were born?

The past is irrevocable. We cannot change the smallest detail of what some people did to other people after both have gone to their graves.

Meanwhile, the old South has already changed. There is no way that the South of the mid-twentieth century would have elected a woman of Indian ancestry to be governor of South Carolina or a man of Indian ancestry to be governor of Louisiana, much less have Southern states that voted for a black President of the United States.

Perhaps the strongest evidence of the changes is that the black migrations out of the South a hundred years ago have now reversed -- with younger and better educated blacks leading the new migrations from the North to the South. When people vote with their feet, that tells us a lot more than any polls.

If the past is out of our hands, what is in our hands today are the present and the future -- and both have big challenges. Whatever policies or practices we consider need to be judged by their actual consequences, not by their rhetoric.

"Hate crime" laws are on some people's agenda. But what will such laws actually accomplish? A murderer deserves the death penalty, whether he killed someone of a different race or killed his own twin brother. All that "hate crime" laws can do is provide the murderer's lawyer with another ground on which to appeal the conviction or the sentence.

Trying to make up for the past with present-day benefits has a track record that shows many counterproductive consequences.

The federal government's pressures against schools to not discipline so many black males is another "benefit" for blacks that is far from beneficial. It means that a handful of hoodlums in a classroom can prevent all the other black children from getting a decent education, which may be their only chance for a decent life.

Another "benefit" for blacks that turns out not to be beneficial is giving the police orders to back off during ghetto riots. Whether in Baltimore recently or in Detroit back in the 1960s, the net result has been more people killed, most of them black, and a whole community put on the downward path of physical and social deterioration.

We need a lot more serious thinking about the present and the future, and a lot less time and energy spent on the past.

]]>mark.donahoohatchell+ThomasSowell@gmail.com (Thomas Sowell)State of AffairsTue, 14 Jul 2015 05:41:04 +0000Bernie Sanders Is the Future of the Democratic Partyhttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/2676-bernie-sanders-is-the-future-of-the-democratic-party
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/2676-bernie-sanders-is-the-future-of-the-democratic-party"The rise of Bernie Sanders is proving awkward for the Democratic Party," contends Politico in a recent piece about the surprisingly popular socialist presidential candidate.

Well, maybe it's not that surprising. And it's probably not that awkward. Politico could have just as easily declared: The rise of Bernie Sanders is a completely predictable outcome of the Democratic Party's trajectory. Or, maybe: The rise of Bernie Sanders portends a socialistic future for the Democratic Party.

After all, while the press had fun detailing every rightward lurch of the conservative movement, not only has the "socialist surge" been a restive force within Democratic Party politics during the Obama Age, but it's been making tremendous policy progress.

Although we rarely frame politics in these terms, as a philosophical matter, we've often been engaged in a debate that pits the theories of 18th-century liberalism -- the kind that brought us the Constitution and limited government -- against ideas first embraced in 19th-century Marxism. Is there any doubt the left's grassroots is driven by the latter, whether it's intuitively or on purpose? Just think about the emotional core (often confused as an intellectual position), the rhetoric and the focus that propel most ideas liberals toss around about inequality, plutocracy, "democracy" and the role of government in our lives.

So the author of the psychosexual drama "Man -- and Woman" is polling at 35 percent in one recent CNN poll of New Hampshire, even though he is supposedly operating far outside the norms of American political debate. Sanders can draw 10,000 fervent fans at a campaign event in Wisconsin -- a number that would be envied by most presidential candidates this cycle. Sanders correctly points out that his positions on higher minimum wage, pay equity and other state interference in markets enjoy high approval ratings with most voters. "It is not a radical agenda," he says. "In virtually every instance, what I'm saying is supported by a significant majority of the American people."

This is almost true.

What is wholly true is that big majorities within the Democratic Party support these policies, and they would probably go a lot further if they could. Hillary Clinton is lucky there isn't a more compelling and charismatic candidate making a more comprehensive socialistic case to Americans, as there was the last time around. The difference between her adopted position and his real one is scope.

That's not to say Democrats are unadulterated socialists sitting around studying communist theorists in their spare time, any more than small-government conservatives are opposed to every state-run program. But today, many prefer policies that would be referred to as socialist anywhere else in the world. And the stigma attached to the word is slowly, and fittingly, disintegrating.

According to a YouGov poll, 52 percent of Americans hold favorable views of capitalism, while only 26 percent have a favorable view of socialism. When broken down further, 43 percent of Democrats hold sympathetic views toward socialism. Democrats are just as likely to have a favorable view of capitalism as they do collectivism. The future does not bode well for free-market fans. According to a Pew poll, 49 percent of those between ages 18 and 29 say they have a positive view of socialism -- with only 43 percent having a negative view. Considering the history and connotation of the word, that's quite extraordinary.

So the awkwardness surrounding Sanders' candidacy -- one that is supposed to make Clinton seem more reasonable -- is that he is running with almost indistinguishable philosophical positions from the frontrunner.

Now, of course, Sanders will not win the Democratic Party nomination. I'm skeptical he's even as popular as polls claim. Still, he's moved to the ideological center of the Democratic Party without changing at all. So will his ideas. Democrats will not pull back once they get their $10 minimum wage. They will not be content once universal pre-K is passed. They will not be satiated after the next round of unilateral Environmental Protection Agency intrusions into the energy markets are instituted. And liberals will never concede that health care is now working and so we won't need any more government involvement.

Liberals may not believe in controlling the means of production, but many do believe in tightening controls enough through regulatory regimes and laws that they can dictate the outcome in markets they do care about. When the downturn hit us, Americans witnessed an unprecedented array of interventions, producing the weakest recovery in history. When oil prices spiked, and the populist rage against energy companies was reaching a crescendo, a Rasmussen poll found that a plurality of Democrats (37 percent) supported outright nationalization of the oil companies. When the health care debate was at its most overwrought, a New York Times/CBS News poll found a majority supporting a government-run insurance company. What happens the next time we're in trouble?

Sanders might be treated as an outlier. But really, it's more likely he's the future.

]]>mark.donahoohatchell+DavidHarsanyi@gmail.com (David Harsanyi)State of AffairsSun, 12 Jul 2015 18:39:49 +0000The Democrats' Trump Cardhttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/58-immigration/2671-the-democrats-trump-card
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/58-immigration/2671-the-democrats-trump-cardPresident Obama seems on the verge of the most abject diplomatic capitulation in American history -- to Iran, our bitterest enemy -- and Republicans are arguing about Donald Trump? The prospect of a deal with Iran is dumbfounding and infuriating, as the U.S. held all the cards in the protracted negotiations and yet executed serial surrenders to the Iranians, rather like a courtier bowing his way backward from a monarch.

While the Obama administration is paving the way for a possible mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv or New York in the near term, we're all tying ourselves in knots about what Trump said about Mexicans. The Democrats seem to have a Trump card.

Immigration arouses tremendous rage among both left and right. The left, always panting to push grievance buttons, transforms illegal immigrants into yet another clientele -- as if those who enter the country illegally are entitled to legal status, benefits and even citizenship. They establish "sanctuary cities" as if enforcing immigration laws amounts to persecution.

This drives the right crazy. You don't break into my house and then demand the keys, they fume. While I like a good brawl as much as the next person, it seems that Trump is the answer only if the question is: Why can't we get more oafish egomaniacs into politics? Just when the Republican Party needs finesse and sensitivity when discussing immigration, just when it needs to focus on issues that unite all sectors of the electorate including Hispanic and Asian voters, it gets a blowhard with all the nuance of a grenade.

Trump's smear about Mexican immigrants was about as far away as you can get from Ronald Reagan's, "Hispanics are Republicans; they just don't know it yet." Trump tarred most Mexican immigrants as drug-dealers, criminals and rapists, allowing only as an afterthought that some may be good people. He claimed to have discussed the matter with border guards. (Would those officers please step forward?) In any case, crude and vulgar people always preen that they are brave truth tellers.

Trump has achieved his objective -- making himself the center of attention -- but he has subtracted from our sum total of knowledge about the immigration issue. According to an analysis of Census Bureau data by the Immigration Policy Center, only 1.6 percent of immigrant males between the ages of 18-39 are incarcerated, compared with 3.3 percent of the native-born. There are terrible stories of immigrants committing crimes, and it's certainly fair to demand that criminal aliens be deported with dispatch. Sanctuary cities are a disgrace. But just as Dylann Roof doesn't represent white people, Mexican rapists don't represent anyone other than themselves.

Oddly, the entire brouhaha over immigration may be misplaced. If demographers are correct, the great wave of immigration from Latin America is over. As Jonathan V. Last noted in the Los Angeles Times, birthrates are plunging throughout our hemisphere. Between 1970 and 2005, Mexico was the source for roughly two-thirds of the million or so immigrants who entered the United States yearly. When this huge migration began, Mexico's birthrate was 6.72 children per woman. It has since fallen to 2.1, and it continues to decline. Last writes: "Countries with fertility rates below the replacement level tend to attract immigrants, not send them." And voila, since 2005, net migration from Mexico has been zero.

The Census Bureau reports that starting in 2013, the country that sent the most immigrants to the U.S. was China, with 147,000, followed by India, with 129,000, and Mexico, with 125,000 (an equal number of Mexicans living here went home). Other Latin American nations whose fertility rates have already dropped below replacement -- Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and Costa Rica -- send virtually no immigrants north.

Some immigrants will doubtless continue to arrive. As Tamar Jacoby of ImmigrationWorks USA put it, "Once they see that you don't have to bribe the police here, they're satisfied." There remains much to recommend the USA as a destination, and we've been lucky that our neighbors to the south roughly share our religion and civilization (unlike the Muslim immigrants who've flooded Europe during the same period). But with world fertility rates declining, the U.S. may face an unexpected problem: too few immigrants. In 1960, half of the U.S. workforce consisted of high school dropouts. Today, it's only 6 percent. Yet the jobs for low-skilled workers -- busboys, chambermaids, food processing -- remain. If employers cannot find workers for those jobs, there will be fewer managerial and executive positions for native-born Americans.

It's a complex subject that deserves grownup discussion -- exactly what Trump and his claque preclude.

]]>mark.donahoohatchell+MonaCharen@gmail.com (Mona Charen)ImmigrationFri, 10 Jul 2015 05:01:25 +0000Congress Makes a Bad Education Law Worsehttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/48-education/2669-congress-makes-a-bad-education-law-worse
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/48-education/2669-congress-makes-a-bad-education-law-worseIf ever there were a moment to build a popular consensus against federal meddling in education, this is it.

The House of Representatives on Wednesday narrowly passed HR 5 reauthorizing No Child Left Behind, the contentious education law that made federal aid contingent upon higher standards and test scores. The vote was 218-213.

Also known as the “Student Success Act,” HR 5 by Representative John Kline, R-Minn., purportedly gives local school districts and states more control over assessing teacher and student performance. It also underscores the longstanding prohibition against the national government setting specific standards or imposing a 50-state curriculum. And it would allow federal dollars to follow low-income kids to the public school of their choice.

Local control, state-based standards and curricula and funding portability are all very good things. Yet nobody is thrilled with this legislation. Every Democrat voted against it, which is hardly surprising. Among other things, the bill doesn’t include the $20 billion or so they wanted for Title I programs aimed at propping up failing schools in low-income neighborhoods. Left-leaning activist groups had also demanded more money for pet social justice projects and less money for charter schools.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan complained, “House Republicans have chosen to take a bad bill and make it even worse. Instead of supporting the schools and educators that need it most, this bill shifts resources away from them.”

Duncan is right that the bill is bad, but for the wrong reasons.

To the extent government should be involved at all in setting education policy, it should be state and local elected officials and citizens making the decisions. Parents should have the right to select the best schooling options for their children — one size does not fit all. And the federal government should have no role whatsoever.

Those are the principles. Reality is much different.

Congress passed the No Child Left Behind law in 2002, which reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 and added now-reviled provisions, such as the mandate that 100 percent of students achieve proficiency in reading and math by 2014.

The law expired in 2007, it’s 2015 and you may have noticed that America’s school children are nowhere near 100 percent proficient in anything. Since 2011, Duncan’s department has been issuing waivers from NCLB’s mandates to states and large urban school districts. With strings attached, of course. Chief among them: requiring states to quickly adopt Common Core tests without much in the way of scrutiny.

Twenty-seven Republicans opposed Kline’s bill, too, despite the inclusion of some language limiting Duncan’s ability to rewrite regulations on the fly. Conservatives proposed about 100 amendments to the bill that would have narrowed dramatically the size and scope of the federal government’s role in education.

Most of those amendments failed. One particularly cheeky proposal would have let states opt out of the law entirely while still receiving federal tax dollars. The few that passed may actually hurt more than they help. One in particular is a disaster in the making.

The House voted 251-178 to approve an amendment by Representative Matt Salmon, R-Ariz., that would allow parents to opt their kids out of onerous standardized tests. Clearly, Salmon intended to give parents and states an escape hatch from controversial Common Core tests. What’s wrong with that?

As Matthew Ladner of the Foundation for Excellence in Education points out, Salmon’s amendment doesn’t simply eliminate NCLB’s federal testing mandate. That would make some sense. Rather, it creates a parental opt-out for state-testing systems, many of which predate the federal law.

“Both past experience and simple logic,” Ladner writes at University of Arkansas education professor Jay P. Greene’s weblog, “would lead one to the conclusion that creating a federal parental opt-out for state testing systems will create a powerful incentive for school officials to nudge low-performing students (read: black, brown, children with disabilities) out of standardized testing to improve their [school’s] scores.”

States don’t simply use their test scores to secure federal dollars. They use the data to assess students’ strengths and weaknesses. More important, reformers have used that information to craft innovative ways of disrupting the public school monopoly.

California, for example, passed a law in 2011 that lets parents at failing schools petition for certain reforms, such as converting to a charter school or replacing the faculty, that school districts must undertake. That “parent trigger” law was made possible by the state’s Academic Performance Index, which is calculated in part with student test scores.

Again, if the guiding principle is that education policy decisions properly belong to state and local governments, then Congress has no business overriding states that have had state accountability standards in place years before the federal government got into the accountability business.

If you’re going to have federal meddling in public education — and, let’s face it, there is no broad political consensus to do otherwise at the moment — then the guiding precept should be to do as little harm as possible. By that standard, HR 5 and Salmon’s amendment fail.

The Obama administration opposes Kline’s bill, and the House and Senate versions of the new and not-so-improved NCLB law still need to be reconciled. Even in the event of a compromise, the president might just veto the bill and force a do-over. That would leave in place a rotten status quo, with the Department of Education attempting to micromanage states through a deeply flawed waiver system, and states without vital data they need to make genuinely helpful reforms.

After eight years of failing to come to an accord on No Child Left Behind, perhaps one more high-profile failure will give lawmakers reason to rethink the entire federal education apparatus. Unlikely — but one can hope.

]]>mark.donahoohatchell+bboychuk@gmail.com (Ben Boychuk)EducationThu, 09 Jul 2015 16:41:10 +0000Obama Claims "Good Month" That He Did Nothing to Bring Abouthttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/2670-obama-claims-qgood-monthq-that-he-did-nothing-to-bring-about
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/2670-obama-claims-qgood-monthq-that-he-did-nothing-to-bring-aboutAccording to conventional wisdom and conformist punditry, the past month has been a good one for Barack Obama.

Of course, even assuming that to be true for purposes of argument, it's only good relative to the low expectations created by six years of his presidency. Even Jimmy Carter, the most notoriously inept president of our lifetimes, couldn't identify in a recent interview a single place where America stands stronger and more respected today than when Obama took office:

"On the world stage, just to be as objective about it as I can, I can't think of many nations in the world where we have a better relationship now than we did when he took over. If you look at Russia, if you look at England, if you look at China, if you look at Egypt and so forth, I'm not saying it's his fault, but we have not improved our relationship with individual countries and I would say that the United States influence and prestige and respect in the world is probably lower now than it was six or seven years ago."

Damning stuff, that. In fairness to Obama, however, perhaps that's actually not entirely accurate. Specifically, the dictatorships in Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and North Korea probably prefer him to his predecessor.

Meanwhile, in other measures of Obama's performance, America continues to struggle through the worst post-recession recovery on record, one that hardly justifies the term "recovery" at all. Median U.S. income is lower today than it was six years ago in June 2009, when the last recession ended. That is unprecedented. During that same stretch we witnessed several consecutive deficits in excess of $1 trillion, when the record deficit prior to Obama's presidency was less than half that amount at $450 billion.

To further illustrate the depth of Obama's economic mismanagement, consider the monthly employment report released last week that some celebrated as part of his "good week." While Obama and others falsely trumpeted a headline number of 223,000 new jobs, they ignored that nearly twice as many - 432,000 people - dropped out of the American workforce. As a result, today's labor participation rate now stands at 62.6%, the lowest level since 1977 when women hadn't yet fully entered the U.S. workforce.

Obama apologists and some pundits nevertheless consider this a halcyon stretch of his administration. One basis for such claims is the recent passage of "fast track" trade promotion authority in Congress. But that was an accomplishment attributable to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R - Kentucky) and Speaker of the House John Boehner (R - Ohio). Democrats in Congress actually humiliated Obama by disrupting the legislation before Republicans saved the day in the name of economic growth and free trade. In other words, the legislation occurred despite Obama, not because of him.

Similarly, Obama and his supporters plagiarized credit for the recent Supreme Court decisions on ObamaCare subsidies and same-sex marriage. Regardless of one's substantive position on the merits of those cases, it's bizarre to count either one as some sort of accomplishment on the part of Obama. In the ObamaCare case, the pivotal votes were provided by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy, who were appointed by Presidents Bush and Reagan respectively. Besides, since when is it a measure of presidential achievement that his signature bill surprisingly and barely managed to withstand Supreme Court scrutiny? And on the 5-4 decision regarding same-sex marriage, Justice Kennedy was again the deciding vote. It must also be emphasized that until just recently, Obama himself professed opposition to same-sex marriage. Former Vice President Dick Cheney, a man obviously demonized by Obama loyalists, stated unequivocal support for same-sex marriage several years before Obama felt politically safe enough to do so.

Additionally, consider Obama's continuing unpopularity among the American electorate. Even today, after all of the recent "achievements" for which he and his apologists claim false credit, his RealClearPolitics composite popularity/unpopularity index of all major public opinion surveys remains underwater in the 43% approval/49% disapproval range. That has been the case for almost the entirety of Obama's presidency, as his unpopularity has consistently exceeded his popularity.

By way of further illustration, after eight years of Ronald Reagan's presidency, the American public broadly shared his belief that government is more often the cause of our problems than the solution to our problems. Obama, in contrast, has only witnessed the federal government that he has done so much to expand fall to record lows of public esteem during his tenure.

Thus, Obama's presidency is a failed one, as even Jimmy Carter acknowledges. It may therefore be understandable that he'd claim false credit for events for which he was not responsible, but it doesn't make those claims true.

]]>tlee@cfif.org (Timothy H. Lee)State of AffairsThu, 09 Jul 2015 14:29:14 +0000The Problem with the Hillary Campaign? Hillaryhttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/2668-the-problem-with-the-hillary-campaign-hillary
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/2668-the-problem-with-the-hillary-campaign-hillaryIf it weren’t for the fact that she represents nearly everything that’s wrong with American politics, you’d almost be tempted to feel bad for Hillary Clinton.

Here she is, 67 years of age, whatever vigor she once had long since departed, running a presidential campaign with no clear sense of purpose to win over a progressive electorate that regards her as serviceable at best and a charlatan at worst.

This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. One imagines that Mrs. Clinton always thought there would be a pot of gold at the end of the political rainbow that took her from Little Rock to the White House to the U.S. Senate to the State Department. After all, she’s in line to be the first female chief executive of the United States of America. Shouldn’t that occasion the same kind of rapturous enthusiasm that accompanied Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008?

And yet Mrs. Clinton draws little adulation outside of the ranks of those who are on her payroll. At this point, the Clinton campaign’s slogan might as well be “Hillary 2016: Why Aren’t You People More Excited?”

To be fair to the former Secretary of State, this isn’t all her doing. Barack Obama is essentially handing her the keys to a car with an empty tank of gas. Yes, the president has racked up many major progressive victories over the course of his two terms, but he’s done so with a stunning disregard for public opinion.

Don’t like ObamaCare? Tough, we’re going to pass it anyway — even if it destroys our congressional majorities. Won’t confirm our nominees? We’ll blow up the entire recess appointment process (and earn a unanimous smackdown from the Supreme Court in the process). Won’t give us the immigration bill we want? We’ll just do it by executive fiat.

That’s all well and good for the President, who seems to precisely calculate just how much he can get away with without suffering any personal sanction. It’s not a great arrangement, however, for the candidate who carries the burden of succeeding him — and of defending a record of lawlessness, weakness in international affairs and persistently mediocre economic results.

Barack Obama’s legacy is an anchor that threatens to take Hillary Clinton down with it. How haunting must that idea be for the former Secretary of State? Obama could cost her the presidency twice in the course of eight years. Except, let’s be honest: That’s an overstatement.

The Clinton people told themselves that, in hindsight, it was virtually impossible to overcome the Obama juggernaut in 2008. And while no one doubts the fierceness of that fight, let’s not forget how close the race — which ran through to the final primaries in June — actually was. Barack Obama didn’t win because he was destiny’s child. He won, at least in part, because Hillary Clinton was a bad candidate.

That fact is becoming clearer in a 2016 race where Hillary has no foil of comparable stature. Having the spotlight all to herself only magnifies the myriad deficiencies: the robotic speaking style, the icy demeanor, the contempt for anyone who dares to question her, the long history of cutting ethical corners. Will America really give a woman who doesn’t wear well in 30-second TV appearances four years at the epicenter of national life?

Well, maybe not. A CNN/ORC poll released in late May revealed that 57 percent of Americans thought Mrs. Clinton was not “honest or trustworthy.” That’s not a great place to be starting when you’ve got 18 months of campaigning in front of you — doubly so when you’re a figure as well known as Hillary, diminishing the chances that you’re going to be able to change minds that have long since been made up.

There was a time when the idea of a Hillary 2016 campaign seemed like the logical next chapter in the story of the Democratic Party’s ascendancy in American politics. These days, it looks more like a replay of the 2008 Republican campaign: one in which the candidate is unloved and the party is intellectually exhausted. At some point in the next year and a half, Mrs. Clinton is going to begin having to entertain a disquieting thought: Despite the exertions of 40 years, she may never reach the end of that rainbow.

]]>mhatchell3@cfif.com (Troy Senik)State of AffairsWed, 08 Jul 2015 18:03:42 +0000Is Your Church Abetting Sanctuary Nation?http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/58-immigration/2667-is-your-church-abetting-sanctuary-nation
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/58-immigration/2667-is-your-church-abetting-sanctuary-nationThe random, heartless murder of a young tourist on San Francisco's Pier 14 by a five-time illegal alien deportee who benefited from the "progressive" city's sanctuary policy has law-abiding Americans, law enforcement officials and political opportunists of all stripes up in arms.

But for decades, feckless government leaders ignored the pleas of families who suffered the bloody consequences of open borders.

For every Kate Steinle who died at the hands of an illegal alien sanctuary beneficiary, there is a Tony, Michael and Matthew Bologna in San Francisco.

As I've reported time and again, liberal "sanctuary" programs in these metropolitan areas have protected, harbored and enabled criminal illegal aliens who disappeared into the deportation abyss. Both Democrats and Republicans, goaded by Big Government and Big Business interests, collaborated to turn America into a collective sanctuary nation. Non-enforcement is the rule, deportation evasion is the game, and the country is a safe haven -- for law-breakers from around the world.

Yet, even as born-again tough-on-borders grandstanders now race in front of cameras to condemn these dangerous policies, churches across the country are brazenly thumbing their noses at our immigration laws. And political phonies are doing nothing to stop them.

In Northeast Portland, Ore., the Augustana Lutheran Church is shielding illegal alien Francisco Aguirre-Velasquez after he committed drunk driving and drug crimes and violated deportation rules.

In Tucson, Ariz., illegal alien Daniel Neyoy Ruiz took open, public refuge at Southside Presbyterian Church and then First Christian Church to avoid deportation. Fellow illegal alien Rosa Robles Loreto has been living at First Christian for nearly a year.

In Austin, Texas, First Unitarian Universalist church is harboring illegal alien Sulma Franco after the feds denied her deportation appeal.

In Denver, illegal alien Arturo Armando Hernandez Garcia has taken up long-term residence at First Unitarian Society of Denver church.

In Chicago, illegal alien Elvira Arellano settled at the United Methodist Church of Adalberto for a year before finally being ejected back to Mexico. Last year, the serial law-breaker somehow returned to the Windy City to protest her status "in the shadows."

The Catholic Church has been at the forefront of the 1960s-era sanctuary movement, with top officials openly promoting immigration anarchy and lawlessness among their flock in the name of "humanity" and "compassion."

As I've long noted, it's one thing to show compassion to legal immigrants, legitimate refugees and asylees, and those abused and mistreated by smugglers. It's quite another to conspire against an orderly immigration and entrance system that imposes common-sense limits, eligibility requirements, criminal background checks, medical screening and a commitment to assimilation. Catholic groups have contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to building shelters for illegal aliens from Central America and way stations in southern Mexico.

The unholy alliance between church leaders and the open-borders lobby extends from the Vatican to Rev. Jim Wallis' Faith in Public Life (FPL) network, the Los Angeles-based Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE) and the George Soros-tied Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ). It's a web of nearly 100 interfaith committees, campus agitators and "workers centers" steeped in the organizing tactics of Saul Alinsky on behalf of millions of illegal aliens filling the pews and coffers of their abettors.

Capitol Hill's abdication of its duties to protect and defend our borders is bad enough. But if people of faith choose to sit silently as a "new sanctuary movement" of tax-exempt houses of worship defiantly and recklessly undermines our immigration laws, our national sovereignty doesn't have a prayer.

]]>mark.donahoohatchell+MichelleMalkin@gmail.com (Michelle Malkin)ImmigrationWed, 08 Jul 2015 14:28:08 +0000A Legacy of Clichéshttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/2665-2015-07-06-21-06-32
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/2665-2015-07-06-21-06-32Discussions of racial problems almost invariably bring out the cliché of "a legacy of slavery." But anyone who is being serious, as distinguished from being political, would surely want to know if whatever he is talking about -- whether fatherless children, crime or whatever -- is in fact a legacy of slavery or of some of the many other things that have been done in the century and a half since slavery ended.

Another cliché that has come into vogue is that slavery is "America's original sin." The great Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that a good catch phrase could stop thinking for fifty years. Catch phrases about slavery have stopped people from thinking, even longer than that.

Today the moral horror of slavery is so widely condemned that it is hard to realize that there were thousands of years when slavery was practiced around the world by people of virtually every race. Even the leading moral and religious thinkers in different societies accepted slavery as just a fact of life.

No one wanted to be a slave. But their rejection of slavery as a fate for themselves in no way meant that they were unwilling to enslave others. It was just not an issue -- until the 18th century, and then it became an issue only in Western civilization.

Neither Africans, Asians, Polynesians nor the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere saw anything wrong with slavery, even after small segments of British and American societies began to condemn slavery as morally wrong in the 18th century.

What was special about America was not that it had slavery, which existed all over the world, but that Americans were among the very few peoples who began to question the morality of holding human beings in bondage. That was not yet a majority view among Americans in the 18th century, but it was not even a serious minority view in non-Western societies at that time.

Then how did slavery end? We know how it ended in the United States -- at a cost of one life lost in the Civil War for every six slaves freed. But that is not how it ended elsewhere.

What happened in the rest of the world was that all of Western civilization eventually turned against slavery in the 19th century. This meant the end of slavery in European empires around the world, usually over the bitter opposition of non-Western peoples. But the West happened to be militarily dominant at the time.

Turning back to the "legacy of slavery" as an explanation of social problems in black American communities today, anyone who was serious about the truth -- as distinguished from talking points -- would want to check out the facts.

Were children raised with only one parent as common at any time during the first 100 years after slavery as in the first 30 years after the great expansion of the welfare state in the 1960s?

As of 1960, 22 percent of black children were raised with only one parent, usually the mother. Thirty years later, two-thirds of black children were being raised without a father present.

What about ghetto riots, crimes in general and murder in particular? What about low levels of labor force participation and high levels of welfare dependency? None of those things was as bad in the first 100 years after slavery as they became in the wake of the policies and notions of the 1960s.

To many on the left, the 1960s were the glory days of their movements, and for some the days of their youth as well. They have a heavy emotional investment and ego investment in the ideas, aspirations and policies of the 1960s.

It might never occur to many of them to check their beliefs against some hard facts about what actually happened after their ideas and policies were put into effect. It certainly would not be pleasant to admit, even to yourself, that after promising progress toward "social justice," what you actually delivered was a retrogression toward barbarism.

The principal victims of these retrogressions are the decent, law-abiding members of black communities across the country who are prey to hoodlums and criminals.

Back in the 19th century Frederick Douglass saw the dangers from well-meaning whites. He said: "Everybody has asked the question, 'What shall we do with the Negro?' I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us." Amen.

]]>mark.donahoohatchell+ThomasSowell@gmail.com (Thomas Sowell)State of AffairsTue, 07 Jul 2015 05:54:28 +0000Vigilance Is Patriotichttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/2662-vigilance-is-patriotic
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/2662-vigilance-is-patrioticMy fellow Americans: If you see something, say something -- even if it means CAIR will threaten to sue you.

Multiple federal agencies and the Department of Defense are on high alert for a possible Islamic terrorist attack on U.S. soil this Independence Day weekend. They've increased security at military bases and sent bulletins to law enforcement officials across the country.

The heightened stance comes in the wake of a bloodthirsty ISIS call to arms for Ramadan; multiple jihad outbreaks in Kuwait, France and Tunisia; and the arrest of at least 30 terror plotters in our country radicalized by ISIS over the past year.

Unfortunately, too much of the nation remains in permanent post-9/11 snooze-button mode. Compounding this collective apathy is political correctness run amok. It's the ever-present handmaiden of terrorism: reluctance to risk offending, unwillingness to stick out one's neck, and feckless aversion of the eyes in the face of existential threats.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, which was designated by the Justice Department as an unindicted terror co-conspirator in 2007 in the federal prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation and others for providing support to Hamas, has gleefully exploited this cultural weakness -- filing intimidation and obstructionist lawsuits left and right against those who have dared to look out and speak up.

CAIR subjected a private citizen, Zaba Davis, to harassing and invasive subpoenas over her opposition to a planned construction project by the Muslim Community Association and Michigan Islamic Academy. A federal judge called CAIR's anti-free speech witch-hunt "chilling." The group has refused to pay sanctions ordered by the court.

In Cleveland, the organization has targeted a police officer for his personal views about sharia and jihad posted on his private Twitter account.

In Washington, CAIR has waged a three-year court battle to prevent Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from pursuing basic investigative questions about border-crossers' ties to jihadist "martyrs" and radical mosques.

You'll recall that it was CAIR that advised six publicity-seeking imams who filed a federal discrimination lawsuit against U.S. Airways and the Metropolitan Airports Commission in Minneapolis-St. Paul several years ago. The Muslim clerics were removed from their flight and questioned for several hours after their suspicious behavior alarmed both passengers and crewmembers. CAIR and the instigating imams targeted "John Does" -- innocent bystanders who alerted the authorities about their security concerns.

After a national backlash and passage of a congressional amendment protecting heroic John Does from frivolous p.c. lawsuits, CAIR quietly dropped its complaint. But their incessant cries of "Islamophobia" remain a potent deterrent to alert whistleblowers and witnesses who risk the manufactured wrath of jihad apologists, funders, enablers and front groups.

The litigious social justice activists have transformed common-sense vigilance into a prosecutable crime of paranoia or prejudice. CAIR and its ilk have succeeded in turning a large portion of America into security eunuchs who pay lip-service courage in times of crisis, yet recoil from the bold, unapologetic acts of self-protection that make such heroism possible in the first place.

Let's not let them win.

This weekend, remember the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 who refused to sit back on 9/11 and let themselves be murdered in the name of Islam without a fight.

Remember the passengers and crewmembers who tackled al-Qaida shoe-bomber Richard Reid on American Airlines Flight 63 before he had a chance to blow up the plane over the Atlantic Ocean.

Remember Brian Morgenstern, the teenage Circuit City worker who fearlessly contacted authorities when suspicious Middle Easterners brought in tapes of themselves shooting off guns and shouting "Allahu Akbar." The men were convicted of plotting to kill American soldiers at Fort Dix.

And as you party, parade and celebrate on this high-alert holiday weekend, remember the words of one of the brilliant men who secured America's independence, Patrick Henry: "The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave."

]]>mark.donahoohatchell+MichelleMalkin@gmail.com (Michelle Malkin)State of AffairsFri, 03 Jul 2015 05:01:15 +0000Whitewashing the Democratic Party's Historyhttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/2657-whitewashing-the-democratic-partys-history
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/54-state-of-affairs/2657-whitewashing-the-democratic-partys-historyHere's what the former president of the United States had to say when he eulogized his mentor, an Arkansas senator:

"We come to celebrate and give thanks for the remarkable life of J. William Fulbright, a life that changed our country and our world forever and for the better. ... In the work he did, the words he spoke and the life he lived, Bill Fulbright stood against the 20th century's most destructive forces and fought to advance its brightest hopes."

So spoke President William J. Clinton in 1995 of a man who was among the 99 Democrats in Congress to sign the "Southern Manifesto" in 1956. (Two Republicans also signed it.) The Southern Manifesto declared the signatories' opposition to the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education and their commitment to segregation forever. Fulbright was also among those who filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That filibuster continued for 83 days.

Speaking of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, let's review (since they don't teach this in schools): The percentage of House Democrats who supported the legislation? 61 percent. House Republicans? 80 percent. In the Senate, 69 percent of Democrats voted yes, compared with 82 percent of Republicans. (Barry Goldwater, a supporter of the NAACP, voted no because he thought it was unconstitutional.)

When he was running for president in 2000, former Vice President Al Gore told the NAACP that his father, Sen. Al Gore Sr., had lost his Senate seat because he voted for the Civil Rights Act. Uplifting story -- except it's false. Gore Sr. voted against the Civil Rights Act. He lost in 1970 in a race that focused on prayer in public schools, the Vietnam War and the Supreme Court.

Gore Jr.'s reframing of the relevant history is the story of the Democratic Party in microcosm. The party's history is pockmarked with racism and terror. The Democrats were the party of slavery, black codes, Jim Crow, and that miserable terrorist excrescence the Ku Klux Klan. Republicans were the party of Lincoln, of Reconstruction, of anti-lynching laws, of the civil rights acts of 1875, 1957, 1960 and 1964. Were all Republicans models of rectitude on racial matters? Hardly. Were they a heck of a lot better than the Democrats? Without question.

As recently as 2010, the Senate president pro tempore was former Exalted Cyclops Robert Byrd, D-W.V. Rather than acknowledge their sorry history, modern Democrats have rewritten it.

You may recall that when MSNBC was commemorating the 50th anniversary of segregationist George Wallace's "Stand in the Schoolhouse Door" stunt to prevent the integration of the University of Alabama, the network identified Wallace as "R-Ala."

The Democrats have been sedulously rewriting history for decades. Their preferred version pretends that all of the Democratic racists and segregationists left their party and became Republicans starting in the 1960s. How convenient. If it were true that the South began to turn Republican due to Lyndon Johnson's passage of the Civil Rights Act, you would expect that the Deep South, the states most associated with racism, would have been the first to move. That's not what happened. The first southern states to trend Republican were on the periphery: North Carolina, Virginia, Texas, Tennessee and Florida. (George Wallace lost these voters in his 1968 bid.) The voters who first migrated to the Republican Party were suburban, prosperous "New South" types. The more Republican the South has become the less racist.

Is it unforgivable that Clinton praised a former segregationist? No. Fulbright renounced his racist past, as did Byrd and Gore Sr. It would be immoral and unjust to misrepresent the history.

What is unforgivable is the way Democrats are still using race to foment hatred. Remember what happened to Trent Lott when he uttered a few dumb words about former segregationist Strom Thurmond? He didn't get the kind of pass Bill Clinton did when praising Fulbright. Earlier this month, Hillary Clinton told a mostly black audience, "What is happening is a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people and young people from one end of our country to another. ... Today Republicans are systematically and deliberately trying to stop millions of American citizens from voting." She was presumably referring to voter ID laws, which, by the way, 51 percent of black Americans support.

Racism has an ugly past in the Democratic Party. The accusation of racism has an ugly present.

In King v. Burwell, they joined the Court's four leftists in preserving federal ObamaCare subsidies despite the law's plain text that only states opting to participate in its schemes were eligible. In the words of dissenting Justice Antonin Scalia, "Words no longer have meaning." Foregoing the more common "I respectfully dissent," Scalia simply said "I dissent" in his unusually harsh condemnation of the decision:

"We should start calling this law SCOTUScare. Perhaps the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will attain the enduring status of the Social Security Act or the Taft-Hartley Act; perhaps not. But this Court's two decisions on the Act will surely be remembered through the years. The somersaults of statutory interpretation they have performed ('penalty' means 'tax,' 'further [Medicaid] payments to the State' means 'only incremental Medicaid payments to the State,' 'established by the State' means 'not established by the State') will be cited by litigants endlessly, to the confusion of honest jurisprudence. And the cases will publish forever the discouraging truth that the Supreme Court of the United States favors some laws over others, and is prepared to do whatever it takes to uphold and assist its favorites."

Beyond the immediate legal and political implications, however, this week's decision provides two important correctives for conservatives and libertarians going forward.

But first, a brief reflection on the ruling's likely impact on the 2016 presidential race. Specifically, that the candidate most likely to suffer in the near term may be Jeb Bush, given his obvious association with the man who appointed Chief Justice Roberts to the Court. Already burdened by suspicion - whether fairly or unfairly - that he's too centrist in today's Republican Party, Bush's indirect association with Roberts could render him subject to voter anger and backlash against the decision. Any "mad as hell" reaction could favor a competitor perceived as more confrontational and less centrist or "establishment."

Regardless of those immediate political consequences, however, this week's decision should forever retire conservatives' and libertarians' habitual condemnation of "judicial activism."

To be clear, that's not to advocate that judges disregard their proper role as neutral interpreters of law rather than arrogant makers of law. After all, when judges disregard the plain text of laws or the Constitution, and instead substitute their personal political desires in overturning valid laws enacted through our representative democratic process, we veer dangerously toward a judicial oligarchy.

On the other hand, undue deference to the other branches of government isn't necessarily better than insufficient deference. Both can be destructive and deviate from proper rulings based upon the text of laws and the Constitution. When, as in this week's ObamaCare decision, judges unduly refrain from overturning laws or administrative interpretations that contravene the plain meaning of statutes or the Constitution, they fail to perform their duty. Excess judicial restraint can undermine the Constitution, the proper separation of powers and our legal rights every bit as much as excess judicial activism.

Second, this week's decision highlights an underemphasized distinction between judicial originalism and judicial textualism, which surprisingly often divides conservative and libertarian jurists and judicial theorists. The issue of flag burning provides an earlier illustration of the distinction, when textualist Justice Scalia ruled that it constituted free speech protected by the First Amendment. In contrast, the equally conservative but more originalist Chief Justice Rehnquist opined in dissent that flag burning could properly be prohibited. The two interpretive approaches typically lead to the same decision, but sometimes they diverge. In this case, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy elevated legislative original intent to preserve federal subsidies, whereas Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito more properly focused on plain text in voting to overturn them.

As repugnant as this decision was, we shouldn't forget or disregard the many instances in which the current Court has reached better decisions for which we should be grateful. From finally affirming the individual right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment, to First Amendment victories such as last year's Hobby Lobby decision and Citizens United, to overturning state-sanctioned racial discrimination in the form of "affirmative action," to restraining Obama National Labor Relations Board and Environmental Protection Agency excesses, or even this week's earlier ruling preserving the property rights of raisin farmers whose crops were confiscated by the federal government, the good has outnumbered the bad.

Nevertheless, the Roberts Court fetish for preserving ObamaCare at all costs is to be condemned. Conservatives and libertarians must also internalize the important lesson that we shouldn't necessarily favor "judicial restraint" over "judicial activism," as well as the importance of textualism versus fealty toward more arbitrary divination of legislative intent.

From the moment the Vatican put out word in December that the Holy Father was keenly interested in the question of environmental protection, particularly the United Nations meeting on climate change in Paris later this year, the mainstream media latched onto the idea — more of a hope, really — that the “Cool Pope” would give “climate deniers” a well-deserved and long overdue rebuke.

Commentators and editorialists began speculating about Republicans’ “pope problem.” More than a few liberals chuckled that just as conservatives accused Democrats of picking and choosing the Church doctrines they support, surely Republican could be accused of the same by dismissing the pope’s encyclical out of hand.

Even before Laudato Si was published officially last week, a veritable constellation of globalists, environmental activists and sundry politicians had an opinion they clamored to share. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon went so far as to say “religion and science are now united.” Vice President Joe Biden, speaking at a clean energy forum last Tuesday, said of Francis: “We have a good one now.” Former Vice President Al Gore said, “I could become a Catholic because of this Pope.”

When the encyclical finally appeared, the New York Times editorial board claimed it was “the first papal encyclical devoted solely to environmental issues” — not quite — and expressed hope that the pope’s words would signal “the beginning of the broad moral awakening necessary to persuade not just one billion Catholic faithful, but humanity at large, of our collective responsibility to pass along a clean and safe planet to future generations. In other words, to do the things that mere facts have not inspired us to do.”

It turns out “Laudato Si” is not a climate change document. Nor is it a scientific treatise, a political manifesto or a brief for statism.

So what is it, then?

It’s a theological appeal, not just to the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, but also to the entire world, to think about the “environment” in terms of all creation, not simply the narrow view of “nature” that many environmentalists hold.

Most of the people praising the pope’s comments on climate change — comments that account for roughly 2 percent of a sprawling, 45,000-word document — seemed to have missed that.

Barbara Hendricks, Germany’s environment minister, praised the pope’s “clear language” and “deep thought,” saying his words are “an incentive for everyone to work to protect the environment.” She hoped the encyclical would move people, “especially in conservative circles that try to talk down the devastating effect of climate change.”

It’s true that Pope Francis supports many of the supposed scientific claims of climate alarmists, including the view that mankind is responsible for global warming. But he’s careful not to make his assertions too sweeping. He accepts that there may be other causes for climate change, including solar cycles and volcanic activity.

Michael Mann, the University of Pennsylvania professor who devised the disputed “hockey stick” graph that purports to show a sharp rise in global temperatures after 1900, actually chided the pope for being too cautious in his approach. “Human activity is most likely responsible not just for ‘most global warming’ but all of it, and then some, because natural factors have been acting slightly in the other direction,” Mann told the New York Times.

That same Times story noted, almost ruefully, “the scattered policy prescriptions in the document do not display the meticulous framing of the scientific statements.” Well, no. But come to think of it, most policy prescriptions do not display the meticulous framing of scientific statements because the “science of politics” is so inexact, it’s practically an art.

On close inspection, what Francis has to say doesn’t quite jibe with the core tenets of the Church of Global Warming, which are often anti-capitalist, anti-growth and at times even anti-human. The pope doesn’t agree with Gore, for example, that “fertility management” is a viable moral strategy for tackling global warming. Amid the fulsome praise of the pope’s statements about man’s role in polluting the environment, few seemed to have played up the portion where Francis says “concern for the protection of nature is also incompatible with the justification of abortion.”

Although his concern for sound ecology couldn’t be clearer (“The Earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth,” he writes on one of the encyclical’s more memorable passages), the pontiff insists that “a return to nature cannot be at the expense of freedom and the responsibility of the human being, that is the part of the world tasked with cultivating its ability to protect and develop their potential.” And he unequivocally rejects the “deification of the earth, which would deprive us of the call to collaborate with it and protect its fragility.” Greenpeace and the Environmental Defense League are not amused.

Pope Francis is not an unabashed friend of free markets. Neither was his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI or his predecessor, Pope St. John Paul II. Most libertarians and conservatives recognize that markets work more efficiently than mandates, and top-down solutions tend to cause more problems than they solve. Where there is state-control of industry, the environment always suffers.

But Francis didn’t write an economic thesis, either. With Laudato Si, he’s given the world plenty to think about and discuss — much more than the Bans, Manns and Gores of the world would have you believe.

]]>info@cfif.org (CFIF Staff)State of AffairsThu, 25 Jun 2015 14:01:21 +0000Holy Hypocrisy and Hot Airhttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/44-energy-and-environment/2653-holy-hypocrisy-and-hot-air
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/44-energy-and-environment/2653-holy-hypocrisy-and-hot-airUnlike Pope Francis, I believe that air-conditioning and the capitalists responsible for the technology are blessings to the world.

Perhaps the head of the Catholic Church, who condemned "the increasing use and power of air-conditioning" last week in a market-bashing encyclical, is unaware of the pioneering private company that has donated its time, energy and innovative heating, ventilating and air-conditioning equipment to the Vatican's most famous edifice for more than a decade.

That's right. While the pontiff sanctimoniously attacks "those who are obsessed with maximizing profits," Carrier Corporation -- a $13 billion for-profit company with 43,000 employees worldwide (now a unit of U.S.-based United Technologies Corp.) -- ensures that the air in the Vatican's Sistine Chapel stays clean and cool.

Last fall, Carrier unveiled a groundbreaking HVAC system for the Vatican to help preserve Michelangelo's masterpieces against pollution caused by the estimated six million visitors who descend on the Sistine Chapel every year to see its famous frescoes.

As the company described it, their new solution "uses two Carrier AquaForce(r) 30XWV water-cooled chillers with Greenspeed(r) intelligence, each with 580 kilowatts of capacity. It leverages specially designed software and components, as well as patented, energy-saving technologies to maintain optimal climate conditions for the protection of the paintings within the chapel." State-of-the-art intelligent controls "anticipate visitor levels and adjust its performance intuitively." It also "delivers twice the efficiency and three times the capacity of the former system, which was built and installed by Carrier in the early 1990s."

Here's the lesson about air-conditioning capitalists that Pope Francis fails to appreciate: Carrier's technological know-how and breakthroughs didn't just descend from the clouds. As I recount in my latest book, "Who Built That," every perfectly chilled home, office, movie theater, mall, factory, hospital, lab and museum owes its existence to the profit-seeking pioneers of manufactured weather: Willis Carrier and Irvine Lyle.

These early 20th-century inventive giants brought air-conditioning to the market and to the masses. Willis Carrier was the scientist-tinkerpreneur whose prolific stream of experiments and epiphanies, beginning in 1902, fueled historic technological advances in heating, refrigeration and air-conditioning. Irvine Lyle was the mechanical engineer-turned-salesman who imagined countless new commercial applications for Carrier's work -- and successfully turned those ideas into a multibillion-dollar business through relentless promotion, pitches, networking, advertising and outreach.

The scientists and their core team begged, borrowed and made stock sales to friends and neighbors. Carrier even enlisted his dentist for cash to get Carrier Engineering Corporation up and running in 1915. Carrier, Lyle and five founding engineers together pitched in $32,600 in start-up funds.

The Carrier capitalists risked it all in defiance of an economic depression and amid the tumult of world war. They couldn't afford their own factory and scrounged for made-to-order parts wherever they could find them. They dug into their own pockets to cover salary shortfalls. The wealth wasn't handed to them. Carrier and Lyle, farm boys who both graduated from Cornell, drove their men hard and themselves harder.

The Carrier team sold its products to businesses, large and small, that spanned the spectrum of human needs and wants. The pope should know that in addition to sparing countless lives from death by heat wave, Carrier designed a special system for Jonas Salk that helped maintain constant temperatures in the vats where Salk's poliovirus strains grew. The Salk vaccine saved thousands of lives and spearheaded the vaccine revolution.

From Hollywood to the pharmaceutical industry to textiles to the retail industry to the military to homeowners, there isn't a sector of the American economy that Carrier and Lyle didn't help transform. Their zealous focus on helping businesses provide better products at cheaper costs resulted in the invaluable byproducts of increased health, comfort and happiness.

While the pope blames commercial enterprises and the "global market economy" for causing "environmental degradation," it is a worldwide commercial enterprise made in America that solved the human-caused degradation of, and environmental damage to, the Vatican's most prized art and assets.

If the pontiff truly believes "excessive consumption" of modern conveniences is causing evil "climate change," will he be shutting down and returning the multimillion-dollar system Carrier generously gifted to the Vatican Museums?

If not, I suggest, with all due respect, that Pope Francis do humanity a favor and refrain from blowing any more hot air unless he's willing to stew in his own.

]]>mark.donahoohatchell+MichelleMalkin@gmail.com (Michelle Malkin)Energy & EnvironmentWed, 24 Jun 2015 05:09:19 +0000Hillary and Historyhttp://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/45-foreign-policy/2652-hillary-and-history
http://cfif.org/v/index.php/commentary/45-foreign-policy/2652-hillary-and-historyThere are no sure things in politics, but Hillary Clinton is the closest thing to a sure thing to become the Democrats' candidate for president in 2016.

This is one of the painful but inescapable signs of our time. There is nothing in her history that would qualify her for the presidency, and much that should disqualify her. What is even more painful is that none of that matters politically. Many people simply want "a woman" to be president, and Hillary is the best-known woman in politics, though by no means the best qualified.

What is Hillary's history? In the most important job she has ever held -- Secretary of State -- American foreign policy has had one setback after another, punctuated by disasters.

U.S. intervention in Libya and Egypt, undermining governments that were no threat to American interests, led to Islamic extremists taking over in Egypt and terrorist chaos in Libya, where the American ambassador was killed, along with three other Americans.

Fortunately, the Egyptian military has gotten rid of that country's extremist government that was persecuting Christians, threatening Israel and aligning itself with our enemies. But that was in spite of American foreign policy.

In Europe, as in the Middle East, our foreign policy during Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State was to undermine our friends and cater to our enemies.

The famous "reset" in our foreign policy with Russia began with the Obama administration reneging on a pre-existing American commitment to supply defensive technology to shield Poland and the Czech Republic from missile attacks. This left both countries vulnerable to pressures and threats from Russia -- and left other countries elsewhere wondering how much they could rely on American promises.

Even after Russia invaded Ukraine, the Obama administration refused to let the Ukrainians have weapons with which to defend themselves. President Obama, like other presidents, has made his own foreign policy. But Hillary Clinton, like other Secretaries of State, had the option of resigning if she did not agree with it. In reality, she shared the same flawed vision of the world as Obama's when they were both in the Senate.

Both of them opposed the military "surge" in Iraq, under General David Petraeus, that defeated the terrorists there. Even after the surge succeeded, Hillary Clinton was among those who fiercely denied initially that it had succeeded, and sought to discredit General Petraeus, though eventually the evidence of the surge's success became undeniable, even among those who had opposed it.

The truly historic catastrophe of American foreign policy -- not only failing to stop Iran from going nuclear, but making it more difficult for Israel to stop them -- was also something that happened on Hillary Clinton's watch as Secretary of State.

What the administration's protracted and repeatedly extended negotiations with Iran accomplished was to allow Iran time to multiply, bury and reinforce its nuclear facilities, to the point where it was uncertain whether Israel still had the military capacity to destroy those facilities.

There are no offsetting foreign policy triumphs under Secretary of State Clinton. Syria, China and North Korea are other scenes of similar setbacks.

The fact that many people are still prepared to vote for Hillary Clinton to be President of the United States, in times made incredibly dangerous by the foreign policy disasters on her watch as Secretary of State, raises painful questions about this country.

A President of the United States -- any president -- has the lives of more than 300 million Americans in his or her hands, and the future of Western civilization. If the debacles and disasters of the Obama administration have still not demonstrated the irresponsibility of choosing a president on the basis of demographic characteristics, it is hard to imagine what could.

With our enemies around the world arming while we are disarming, such self-indulgent choices for president can leave our children and grandchildren a future that will be grim, if not catastrophic.